Orange County Noir

Foreword by T. Jefferson Parker

History seems slow in the making until we stop for a second and look back on things. Then the past hits the present like a bullet and we all dive for cover.

I first set foot in Orange County half a century ago. Our new Tustin tract home cost $21,000. The dads wore showing-scalp flattops and skinny neckties. The moms sported hardened coifs and dorky glasses. There were orange groves falling fast and Santa Ana winds blowing hard and station wagons called the Country Squire and the Kingswood Estate rolling, kid-filled, down the suburban streets.

Now look at it. How that Orange County became the one we see today is a tale of migration and war and race and economics and even climate. In ways that are not difficult to see, the changes of Orange County have been the changes of the nation. We are all Orange County and it is us.

Like a beautiful woman, Orange County is easy to label but hard to understand. Gone are the orange-packing houses and the white Republican demographics and the four half-gallons of bottled milk left cold on your porch early in the morning. Gone is the John Birch Society. Gone too are Leary and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

But it is often easier to list what is gone than to truly see what is now here. How do we define these 3.1 million souls? Who gets to define them?

Sometimes it’s good to let our artists and writers be our eyes and ears. That’s part of their job. Sometimes they really get it right. Sometimes they can see around the corners. You can read Kem Nunn’s Tapping the Source. You can watch Orange County, or listen to Richard Stekol or No Doubt.

And you can read the book you are now holding in your hands.

Here are fourteen stories about this intriguing and somehow ineffable locale. Orange County through noir eyes? Why not? There’s a dark side to most places and certainly the names Ramirez and Kraft and Famalaro haven’t slipped your mind. Noir writers are bent toward the darkness, so don’t expect the Orange County in these pages to be quite as sunny as it thinks it is.

But noir writing has its own brand of humor too, and I can foresee a grin or two as you read about a deranged security guard at Disneyland (where else?), or a thirty-something woman who trades in her penniless but hot boy-toy for a paunchy Orange County Republican who can provide her with the good life in east Costa Mesa.

You’ll see some of Orange County’s wonderful diversity on display in these tales. You’ll see an Orange County that looks very little like it did a few short decades ago. You’ll meet insiders and outsiders, power brokers and wannabes, rich and poor, the sacred and the profane.

They’re all out there, whatever there really is. That’s up to you to decide.

Enjoy the black orange.