L.A. Noir Gets a West Hollywood Twist

John Morgan Wilson doesn’t have to go far to enter the world of Benjamin Justice, the gay protagonist of Wilson’s critically acclaimed series of mysteries set in West Hollywood.

Wilson merely has to step outside his two-story house in the Norma Triangle, a tree-lined neighborhood of ‘20s- and ‘30s-vintage homes just above Santa Monica Boulevard.

The historic neighborhood where Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Dandridge once lived is a cozy counterpoint to the nearby stretch of bars and clubs that attract thousands of gays and lesbians on weekends.

Wilson, a veteran newspaper and magazine writer who switched to writing television news, documentaries and reality programs in the early ‘90s, introduced the Norma Triangle and ex-newspaper reporter Benjamin Justice in “Simple Justice,” his 1996 mystery that earned him an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America for best first novel.

Wilson tapped his journalistic background to create the jazz-loving Justice, whom he describes as a man who is “trying desperately to find hope in a world he sees as hopeless.” Justice was a brilliant young investigative reporter who lost his Pulitzer, his job and his reputation when it was discovered that he had fabricated a series on AIDS.

Wilson’s debut mystery opened six years after the scandal broke. Down and out and drinking heavily, Justice is tracked down by his ex-editor, who talks him into helping out a young reporter who is working on a story about a murder in Silver Lake. In Wilson’s third and latest mystery, “Justice at Risk” (Doubleday), Justice has turned 40, stopped drinking and been given a chance to work again: He’s hired to write a segment on unprotected gay sex for a PBS documentary series on AIDS.

But the segment’s co-producer turns up missing, and his mutilated body is found in the Angeles National Forest. Then another documentary filmmaker is murdered, and Justice finds himself caught up in a decades-old police cover-up that leads him into the gay S&M; underworld.

Publishers Weekly calls the book “a startlingly complex and refreshingly sophisticated mystery.”

A Neighborhood Rich in Source Material

Wilson, who moved to West Hollywood from Venice in 1991, draws inspiration at just about every turn in the Norma Triangle and down on Santa Monica Boulevard, where he and Justice share the same haunts: A Different Light bookstore, Stonewall coffeehouse (the model for Tribal Grounds in his novels) and Tango Grill (which he renamed Boy Meets Grill).

“You know how writers are; they’re always making mental notes,” Wilson, 54, said during a recent afternoon stroll through the area. “There are scenes in the first book that came right out of things I saw when I was just walking around the neighborhood; in fact, a couple of very stark images.”

Like the time Wilson was walking up Larrabee Street and saw, through an open window, an emaciated man who was clad only in a diaper and struggling with his walker to cross his living room to get to the refrigerator. He probably had AIDS, Wilson said.

“It’s such a sort of stark, heart-rending image,” recalled Wilson. “To me, it worked as a perfect moment in the book, so I used it.”

Wilson, whose longtime partner died of AIDS in 1987, hadn’t planned on having the disease play a significant role in the first book.

“But when I started writing, all this stuff from the past put itself down on the page, and it just seemed to become an issue that I haven’t been able to escape,” he said. “I really think it’s so deeply embedded in the emotional fabric of every gay man who came through the ‘80s and survived it that it’s difficult in some ways to keep it out of your story if the material is personal.”

Wilson moved to West Hollywood to build new relationships after so many of his close gay friends died of AIDS. He’s been living with Pietro Gamino, an artist, since 1993.

Wearing a white dress shirt, blue jeans and saddle shoes--and with his short-cropped, graying dark-blond hair and thin-rimmed tortoise-shell glasses--Wilson gives the impression he’d be at home on a college campus. In fact, he is, having worked as an instructor with the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program since 1982--first teaching classes in nonfiction writing and now exclusively mystery writing.

He’s currently the supervising writer for “Anatomy of Crime,” a weekly, one-hour documentary scheduled to begin airing on Court TV early next year.

Although Wilson devoured mysteries while growing up in Manhattan Beach, he abandoned the genre by age 17, having grown tired of the formulaic plots and generic styles. He didn’t return to mysteries until about six years ago when a friend urged him to read “Devil in a Blue Dress,” the first of Walter Mosley’s acclaimed Easy Rawlins mysteries set in L.A.’s post-World War II black community.

“I realized mystery writing had changed enormously in the ‘80s,” Wilson said, noting the diversity of subject matter and characters, including gays and lesbians. “Mystery writing has finally grown up and joined the real world.”

After a year of developing his characters and outlining his plot, Wilson wrote “Simple Justice” in seven weeks; he sold it in one.

“Two publishers wanted it; a half-dozen rejected it, and they almost all rejected it for the same thing. They said it was too dark, too hard-edged and the character of Benjamin Justice was too unsympathetic.

“Doubleday bought it for all those reasons: They bought it because it was dark and hard-edged and frankly written.”

From the start, Wilson said, “I wanted to write a gay character and write him very honestly and truthfully. At the same time, I didn’t want to write a gay character in which his being gay was the primary issue--that he was coming out or struggling with coming out. With Justice, he’s gay and you’d better accept it because it’s in your face, and that’s the way he is, and that’s the way I write it.”

Presenting Realistic Characters

Indeed, in the new book, Justice finds himself gawking when he meets the handsome young associate producer on the AIDS series:

“As he stood--in shorts, T-shirt and sandals--I saw a body of average height that was compact but lean, with silky golden hair sprinkled generously along his firmly muscled legs and forearms. If there was anything imperfect about him, I didn’t see it.”

“For me to tiptoe around the sexuality when everything else is so frankly written would not fit the style of the book. I’m not writing the book worrying about people’s comfort level. I’m writing the book in the way it feels right to me in telling the story and creating a world. And where does sexuality fit in within this world? Well, it has a natural place within it.”

* John Morgan Wilson will conduct a two-day workshop for aspiring novelists, “So You Want to Write a Mystery?” through UCLA Extension on Oct. 23 and 24. Registration information: (310) 825-9971.

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* Dennis McLellan can be reached by e-mail at dennis.mclellan@latimes.com.