Still Night in L.A.

by Aram Saroyan

Overview

Michael Shepard, a detective with his own set of problems, is hired one morning by a fashionable young woman at her Hollywood apartment. Soon he’s embroiled in a murder investigation that may shed light on a nearly forgotten tragedy. A divorced father wondering how to set his son on a better course in life, the detective gets into deepening trouble as he negotiates a vivid panorama of the town’s modern-day beautiful and damned. Author Aram Saroyan harnesses the hardboiled styles of Chandler, Hammett, and Ross MacDonald into a contemporary tale of information age intrigue. The text is supplemented with cell phone photos taken by Saroyan in the same environs in which the story unfolds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941110331
Publisher:	Three Rooms Press
Publication date:	10/13/2015
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Aram Saroyan is an internationally known poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright. His poetry has been widely anthologized and appears in many textbooks. Among the collections of his poetry are Aram Saroyan and Pages (both Random House). His largest collection, Day and Night: Bolinas Poems, was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1999. Saroyan's prose books include Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation; Last Rites, a book about the death of his father, the playwright and short story writer William Saroyan; Trio: Portrait of an Intimate Friendship; The Romantic, a novel that was a Los Angeles Times Book Review Critics' Choice selection; a memoir, Friends in the World: The Education of a Writer; and the true crime Literary Guild selection Rancho Mirage: An American Tragedy of Manners, Madness and Murder. He is featured in the documentary film One Quick Move or I’m Gone: Jack Kerouac at Big Sur and his comments appear in the oral biographies George Being George: George Plimpton’s Life and Salinger. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, painter Gailyn Saroyan.

Editorial Reviews

08/10/2015
Set in modern-day Los Angeles, this disappointing detective novel from Saroyan (The Romantic) has a decidedly unfinished feel to it. PI Michael Shepard gets hired by a model, Anita Holbrook, who believes someone may be trying to kill her. When Anita ends up dead a few hours later, he joins forces with a detective working the case. As he closes in on the killer, his life becomes complicated with the arrest of his son on DUI charges. When the killer disappears, Shepard focuses his attention on another case dealing with a husband who thinks his actress wife may be having an affair. Months later, Shepard receives word that the killer from his initial case may have been spotted in the Bay Area. Cardboard characters, an unengaging plot, an unconvincing hard-boiled tone, and incongruous cellphone photos throughout make this an unsatisfying read, especially considering the rich history of noir fiction in the City of Angels. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"A superbly crafted mystery from first page to last, this is a cliff-hanger of a read that will please any and all hard-boiled private eye enthusiasts." —Midwest Book Review

“Neo-noir . . . flexible enough to be a treatment for the big screen. . . The enclosed photographs also maintain the solemn mood.” —Manhattan Book Review

"Aram Saroyan has written a novella, Still Night in L.A., that moves one step further beyond the ambience of Raymond Chandler and the terseness of Raymond Carver. Best-known for his poetry, Saroyan has written a story so crisp and so cryptic that the words almost sparkle on the pages.” —Bookin' with Sunny

“Aram Saroyan nurses the accelerator in a deceptively laconic way, channeling the faultless ratiocination of Charles Willeford (Miami Blues) and Paul Cain (Seven Slayers). STILL NIGHT IN L.A. keeps still until, at just the right moment, he floors it. —Barry Gifford, author, Wild at Heart

“Readers of California-dream-correction fiction may have their particular favourites — Day of the Locust, The Slide Area, I Should Have Stayed Home, My Face for the World To See, The Long Goodbye. Aram Saroyan’s STILL NIGHT IN L.A. brings long experience and practiced narrative craft to earn his place in this line.” —Tom Clark, author, The Exile of Celine

“STILL NIGHT is an edgy and urgent mystery in which the more that is left out, the more we are caught up in wonder. Therein lies the tension of the novel. The need to know and the author's smart dodge, leaking only what he wants known, one page at a time. Not surprisingly this is what all great detective novels do. ” —G. A. Hausman, author, The Mythology of Horses

“STILL NIGHT IN L.A. is a novel where the magic is all in the language, in the evocation of the detective’s incongruously sweet and gentle personality, and in his astoundingly accurate takes on a world where kids have a hard time growing up before they hit middle age, and where the hard thing is not to become a movie star but to get someone to remember your name.” —Gerald Nicosia, author, Home to War: The Untold Story of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement

“Aram Saroyan’s STILL NIGHT IN L.A. cruises the mean streets and trendy brunch boites of Los Angeles, this city of angels and psychopaths. His shamus Michael Shepard is a Marlowe for our digital times.” —Richard Setlowe, author, The Haunting of Suzanna Blackwell

"Aram Saroyan’s Still Night in L.A. delivers on all platforms . . . Get out that gold statue, Edgar committee! The winner and new champion is . . . " —Kevin Killian, Spreadeagle

"A writer who looks deeply into himself and his own experience, confronts what he finds there with real courage and reports what he has experienced with a measure of candor that is both breathtaking and, at moments, heartbreaking."—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

"Here is a novel that pins down an era." —Bookpeople

"Will hold readers spellbound.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher