Fiddling with Southern California at a Time of Upheaval: A.E. Maxwell’s Mystery Series

Abstract

Between 1985 and 1993, Ann Maxwell (aka Elizabeth Lowell) and her husband Evan, a former L.A. Times crime reporter who covered international crime, co-authored a series of neo-noir crime novels featuring the private-eye narrator Fiddler, an independently wealthy, Newport-based macho man with a moral compass and a shady past from which his wealth is derived, and his partner Fiora, a high-powered Orange County banker who made her way into high finance from a humble midwestern background. While the series’s plots and characters follow established genre conventions, the novels’ settings cannily spotlight regions and locales relevant to California in which the geopolitical transformations of the later 1980s and early 1990s were concentrated. The upheaval of California’s social fabric in places such as the Gold Coast, Orange County, Napa Valley, the Mexican border, and even Santa Fe (Los Angeles’s alter ego) provide the background for plots that range from Cold War spies and smugglers to a white-collar breed of criminals such as property development scammers, art forgers, and financial fraudsters, exposing the violent and criminal underbelly of a rapidly globalizing and accelerating economic system in which (some parts of) California played a central role. This article provides a geocritical reading of the mystery series that focuses on its modes of political and social critique of the era of Reaganomics, globalization, and the financialization of property, technology, and culture. The series reveals a sustained engagement with political, social, and cultural upheavals that position these locales as sites of contestation and struggles that are, or turn, violent in a variety of ways.