From Sunshine to Noir: Revisiting Sixties Los Angeles in Postmillennial Crime Narratives

Why does twenty-first-century noir keep returning to 1960s Los Angeles? This book shows how contemporary novels and films – from Inherent Vice to Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood – use noir to investigate memory, power, and resistance under late capitalism. It examines how Sixties Los Angeles becomes a privileged terrain for detection, from the Watts Riots to the Manson murders, enabling noir to recover erased histories of race, surveillance, and counterculture. Combining American Studies wit...