Who walks in L.A.? Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

It was Orhan Pamuk's first L.A. visit. The Turkish native, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, has taught in New York without making it here -- until he appear at an L.A. Public Library ALOUD event earlier this month. Before things got started, he mosied around downtown with writer Lewis MacAdams, who chronicles the experience in today's books pages.

He asked about the history of Bunker Hill. It wasn't the sleek business towers that enchanted him, but the historic core. "All my friends say there is no downtown Los Angeles," Pamuk said, but clearly he was pleased to see that there was. "There is a downtown here," he noted approvingly. "And it looks very old-fashioned." ...

"I like it when there is history, when there is decay. I'm very much impressed that this city has a decaying face. I identify it with my own."

Pamuk, MacAdams writes, "was strolling down Hill Street, recognized by nobody." What a difference a continent makes. In March of 2007, Laura King reported on an increasing uneasiness among the literary world of Istanbul. This is her report of what those days were like for writers, including the outspoken Pamuk.

March 1, 2007: ISTANBUL, TURKEY -- At a recent dinner party on the shores of the Bosporus, the bookish chatter among the Turkish writers and academics present took a sudden grim turn: Are you under police protection yet?

"We were all comparing notes about which of us had only one bodyguard and which of us had two, and we joked a little about being in competition with each other over this," said journalist and novelist Perihan Magden, who was among those placed under police protection after threats by ultranationalists. "It was comical, but also very tragic."

In the wake of the January assassination in Istanbul of prominent ethnic Armenian editor Hrant Dink, Turkey's intellectual community is feeling under siege to a degree not experienced in decades.

A mass outpouring of dismay and revulsion when Dink was gunned down, illustrated by a funeral that drew tens of thousands of mourners, has given way to a powerful right-wing backlash. Shadowy nationalist groups have issued chilling threats against authors and thinkers who, like Dink, speak out against Turkey's official denial that the mass killings of Armenians beginning in 1915 constituted genocide, or on the power of the Turkish military, or the status of minority Kurds.

As a result, novelists are canceling book tours, once-outspoken professors are maintaining a low profile, and crusading columnists like Magden wonder whether their words will wind up costing them their lives.

Gangland L.A. in the 1950s, via pulp nonfiction

In the 1940s and '50s, Los Angeles was home to a remarkably high-profile mob presence. Gang boss -- or former gang boss -- Mickey Cohen was a target, not only for teens with autograph books, but also for people with firebombs and guns. And he was also a target of LAPD Chief William H. Parker. Their struggle for power in the city is the focus of "L.A. Noir" by John Buntin. In our review, Tim Rutten wrote:

By recounting [Parker and Cohen's] biographies in parallel, Buntin creates a social history of Los Angeles in the 20th century, and it makes for compelling reading. Parker and Cohen both were outsiders (one a Catholic and the other a Jew) in a city where commerce and politics weren't the only white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant possessions -- so were the rackets. The author sets up the two men as polar opposites -- and, ultimately, antagonists -- in a city rife with vice of every kind.

It makes for utterly compelling reading, and Buntin's research is copious and fresh enough to inform even those steeped in local history.

On the Powell's Books blog, Buntin reveals some of his sources: true, or mostly true, tales of the times. He recommends two books by journalists, "For the Life of Me" by James H. Richardson and "Headline Happy" by Florabel Muir; Richardson hated Cohen, but Muir was pretty cozy with the mobster. When he was shot (in the shoulder) at a Sunset Strip restaurant, she took a bullet in the bum.

Seems like people were always crossing the line between good guy and bad. "Why I Quit Syndicated Crime" tells the tale of Jim Vaus, a mob henchman turned born-again by Billy Graham, who once tried to convince Cohen to accept Jesus. Charles Stoker, the author of  "Thicker'n Thieves" (billed as "the factual expose of police payoffs, graft, political corruption and prostitution in Los Angeles and Hollywood by ex vice-squad officer") was himself arrested for burglary.

As for his final recommendation, Mickey Cohen's "In My Own Words" -- well, it could only be as honest as the man at the top -- or ex-man-at-the-top -- of the rackets could be.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Mickey Cohen, at court on an assault charge for hitting a waiter, signs autographs for teenage fans. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Jonathan Lethem talks to Jacket Copy about pot, virtual worlds and 'Chronic City'

Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of "The Fortress of Solitude" and "Motherless Brooklyn," comes to the L.A. Central Library on Tuesday night -- although there are no more tickets available, last-minute seats often open up at the ALOUD series. He'll be reading from and discussing his new novel, "Chronic City" which our reviewer described this way:

As "Chronic City" opens, Chase [Insteadman] visits the office of the Criterion Collection to record a DVD voice-over. There, he meets Perkus Tooth, a frantic, ageless scribbler in the spirit of Joe Gould. Perkus, who invades Criterion to write DVD liner notes on spec, is an avid collector of the esoteric cult item. In a rent-controlled Upper East Side apartment he shares with pot smoke and coffee grounds, he tries to gather "ellipsistic knowledge," reconstructing epiphanies through forgotten jazz records and dubbed VHS tapes, attempting to prove that "the horizon of everyday life was a mass daydream -- below it lay everything that mattered."...

Some of Perkus' stoned paranoiac revelations are mind-expanding, while others taper off into a deserved oblivion. But it's hard to remain unsusceptible to his euphoria, especially when he spouts brilliant mini-essays such as one calling Brando "the living avatar of the unexpressed, a human enunciation of the remaining hopes for our murdered era."

Lethem told Jacket Copy more about Brando, about characters who smoke a lot of pot, Los Angeles, a marathon New York City reading and how much "Chronic City" can contain.

Jacket Copy: Your last novel, “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” was set in Los Angeles. Did you spend any time out here when you were working on it?

Jonathan Lethem: Oh yeah, definitely. It was a period when I was traveling there, sporadically, a lot. A couple of different times I spent a month or six weeks. I like L.A., I’m very interested in it. I have, also, some kind of typical New York resistance to it. But I’m not 100% naive about California – I lived in the Bay Area for about 10 years. In a weird way, have two different layers of not being from L.A. As you know, the whole Bay Area-LA split is very strong too, in a different way. I’ve always been very interested in L.A., and I was writing about it out of a real affection in that book.

JC: You've said that you like surprising yourself as a writer, that "You Don't Love Me Yet" set up different challenges for you. Did you find new opportunities working on "Chronic City"?

JL: I'm immensely proud of this book, and I would say that it was a deliberate and controlled book for me. I really felt like, once I created the voice, I was writing something very strong in my work, that I'd worked towards for a long time. But there were also things that were completely new to me. A novel is too extensive an artifact to all be planned. You have to be improvising, and you have to surprise yourself. I prefer it that way -- it gives the thing more life. Those fugue sections, where Chase looks out the window and thinks about the birds and the tower – that was a surprise to me. I thought I was going to write a book that was all velocity, kind of like 'Motherless Brooklyn Part Two,' just Perkus running amok. Then Chase deepened for me, and that was very very rewarding. Those points where the book stops the velocity, and he just is experiencing, abiding with the strange juncture he's come to in his life. Those are very meaningful to me, and I might almost say they're my favorite parts of the book.

JC: In "Chronic City," Perkus becomes something of a mentor to Chase Insteadman.

JL: When he meets Chase, he wants to bring him up to speed on stuff. That part of him is very strongly connected to a relationship that was very important in my life, with a slightly tragic but also very wonderful, reclusive music writer named Paul Nelson who I made friends with in my 20s.  Paul – he didn't resemble Perkus in his manic energies, and he wasn't a pothead and he wasn't a dandy – he was Perkus' opposite in lots of ways.

I was quite naive about certain parts of culture and Paul educated me all in a hurry. He made sure I understood that I had to learn about Howard Hawks and Ross McDonald and Chet Baker and a whole lot of other stuff. He opened a lot of doors for me, and that part of Perkus is a bit of a portrait of what it was like to sit at Paul's feet.

JC: I think one of the pleasures of reading your book is that experience of being culturally curated by the mind of Perkus Tooth. I wonder if that hands-on mentorship is something that is a little bit lost to this next generation, which has this vast electronic cultural curator.

JL: It is really different. You used to have to really excavate the past of American popular culture. It wasn't like there was this gigantic repository at your fingertips. When Paul Nelson wanted me to understand what was so important about an old black and white movie, like "Only Angels Have Wings" by Howard Hawks, he would dig out these VHS tapes he'd dubbed off the "Million Dollar Movie" or PBS, they'd have the commercials intact -- it was this rare essence.

There wasn't a Criterion Collection, and there wasn't an Internet, so most things just vanished. Most people that held onto them, it was some esoteric pursuit to keep things alive. If you ran across a back issue of some old zine – it wasn't like blogs, where they all just sit there forever – you'd find some fading mimeographed zine and it would be a window, a portal into some lost moment of popular culture.

LA Bizarro returns, revived

Twelve years ago St. Martin’s Press released a green-and-purple book with the intriguing title "L.A. Bizarro: The Insider’s Guide to the Obscure, the Absurd and the Perverse in Los Angeles." Written by arbiters of arcana, Anthony Lovett and Matt Maranian, the book quickly gained footing in the city it celebrated, spending 21 weeks on the L.A. Times bestseller list, including a stint in the No. 1 spot.

Last month the first update of the book (the "All-New Insider’s Guide") was released by Chronicle Books. The new edition contains 80% new material, and at 368 pages and nearly as many entries, is almost twice as long as the original. Even the entries that survived the cut were rewritten by the authors, who have clearly honed their irreverent, scathingly witty writing style.

New entries include items as wildly varied as the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. (“Americans expect spectacle from Los Angeles, and we deliver it, usually with nauseating results.”),  Studs Theater (“It’s the Grauman’s Chinese of skin flicks, a Pussycat-era Holdover that is easily missed unless you’re on foot.”, and Salvation Mountain in Niland (“Deemed folk art by many and a toxic hazard by some, one of the more awe-inspiring examples of faith-based outsider art lies on the edge of Highway 111 in arid Niland, a scant five miles east of the Sonny Bono Salton Sea Wildlife Refuge [we couldn’t make this up].”)

The new edition gets the full treatment in today's Calendar section."The quintessential 'Bizarro' place,  Maranian says, "is really hard to get to, slightly disappointing upon arrival and pretty much unlike anything you're likely to stumble upon anywhere else," adding, "I use the word 'disappointing' fondly."

-- Jessica Gelt

Photo: Maranian, left, and Lovett at Clifton's Cafeteria in 2007. Credit: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Michael Connelly will say happy birthday to the Mystery Bookstore on Saturday

The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood celebrates its first birthday with new owners Pam Woods and Kirk Pasich on Saturday. All day, they promise food, drink, fun and authors.

Michael Connelly tops things off at 6 p.m. He'll be signing his latest Harry Bosch novel, "Nine Dragons," as long as you purchase your copy at the store.

"To say that 'Nine Dragons' is coiled tight with suspense understates Connelly's accomplishment in portraying Bosch at the cusp of a new world," our reviewer writes, "And though Connelly remains a master at detailing the intricacies of 'the job,' it is Harry's longing for reunion and connection with his ex-wife and daughter, the overwhelming vulnerability he feels as a father, that makes 'Nine Dragons' another standout."

At 5 p.m., James Ellroy will sign "Blood's A Rover," alongside the real-life Don Crutchfield, who appears, fictionalized, as a young wheel-man in the book. The adult Crutchfield, who became a private detective, will sign copies of his memoir "Confessions of a Hollywood Private Eye." Ask him about the drugs and the Beatles.

Things get underway at 10:30 a.m. with Joseph Kanon ("Stardust"), to be followed by Susan Kandel ("Dial H for Hitchcock"), Charlie Huston ("My Dead Body") and Frank Beddor, whose amped-up graphic-novel retellings of the Alice in Wonderland story are geared for young adults.

The Mystery Bookstore has been around in a couple of locations and under different ownership for 20 years. And if it was somewhat mysterious for Pasich and Woods to take over last year, during a particularly dark time for independent bookstores, this first birthday celebration shows that they're on the right track.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Michael Connelly in Echo Park. Credit: Terrill Lee Lankford / Little, Brown & Co.

Pasadena Museum of California Art launches its first reading series

The happily local Pasadena Museum of California Art is launching a fitting reading series, Written in California. The free series kicks off Thursday at 7 p.m., with discounted ($5) access to the galleries for the hour prior.

Thursday night will feature Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, who was nominated for the National Book Award for her debut novel, "Madeline Is Sleeping." She now lives in Southern California and teaches at UCSD, so she could read her recent short fiction or from her second book, 2008's "The Ms. Hempel Chronicles." Susan Salter-Reynolds wrote our review:

Such a beautiful book is "Ms. Hempel Chronicles," the kind that gives its reader profound insights into ordinary, everyday life. The more such insights we have, the better able we are to really live, and not just go through the motions.

Beatrice Hempel is a young middle-school teacher, "still young enough to decipher the lyrics" of the songs her students listen to, but "old enough to feel that a certain degree of outrage was required of her." Beatrice, Ms. Hempel, is often uncertain of herself. She thinks she is a terrible teacher, but her students love her. The school bureaucracy makes teaching with any heart all but impossible.

Current exhibitions at the museum include "Wayne Thiebaud: 70 Years of Painting," "Behold the Day: The Color Block Prints of Frances Gearhart" and "Population: Portraits by Ray Turner."

Written in California is scheduled to return roughly bimonthly. The next announced reading will be in January 2010, featuring Marisa Silver, an LA Times book prize finalist for her novel "The God of War."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Pasadena Museum of California Art. Credit: Annie Wells / Los Angeles Times

Vintage maps at the Library of Congress

One of the tricky things about websites is they always have to start with a single page. And no matter how many buttons or pop-up menus are crammed into them, it can be hard to get a sense of depth, of how much content lurks behind that original page.

Take the Library of Congress. Its buildings in Washington impart the sense that its holdings are big -- really big. And while its website is perfectly fine -- nice homepage, clean, navigable -- it can't begin to indicate just how much of the massive collection has been put online.

Digging around, as if wandering off into the stacks someplace, I came across this map room. It's packed with historic maps -- of national parks, the Panama Canal, an 1884 hand-drawn map of telegraph lines and roads in Mexico, Civil War battles and much more. It's all rather esoteric, but cartography reveals how we think about place and power -- and it's also beautiful.

The image above came from a 1909 map of the city of Los Angeles. Rendered with amazing precision and detail, it can be appreciated with the somewhat awkward online viewer, or downloaded and gawked at on screen. There, at the corner of 8th and Broadway downtown, you can see a streetcar and palm trees. Buildings are labeled with clarity -- there are more than a few stables.

And those of us who know downtown Los Angeles will be amazed to see just how many big buildings were standing by 1909. We tend to think of this as a young, far-flung city, but 100 years ago, it was a jam-packed metropolis.

Sprawl hadn't yet arrived. The map's key has about 300 listings for apartment buildings and rooming houses, all on this central map. Such a huge portion of the population had chosen to live downtown.

The map barely stretches past Alvarado, to Westlake Park (now MacArthur Park), and off to the west and north lie stretches of open land. Fewer than 30 buildings stand along the long, lonely Sunset Boulevard. On Sixth Street, in what is now the Rampart district, the wealthy Van Nuys family estate sits alone on a large lot, just to the east of "Site of Crown Palace - 500 Rooms - Walter Raymond, Proprietor."

That's a moment of becoming: There are a few other sections of the map labeled with the name -- and in some cases, the contact information -- of the developer. While photographs reveal much about place, a map provides a window into how people lived and what they valued. A century ago, we had two private schools and two bee supply shops, new developments planned along the city's perimeter, all fed by five meat markets, four grocery stores and five breweries.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Detail of 1909 Los Angeles map, Birdseye View Publishing Co., Grosse Building, Los Angeles.

Punk pioneer Brendan Mullen dies

Brendan Mullen, author of several books chronicling L.A.'s punk rock scene -- of which he was an essential part -- died this morning. Mullen, who had been scheduled to DJ at Sunday's Part Time Punks festival, suffered a stroke Saturday. He was 60 years old.

Mullen, who moved to L.A. from Scotland in 1973, opened the punk club the Masque in Hollywood in 1977, originally as a rehearsal space. The place was cheap because it was in a basement -- not just any basement, but one below a Pussycat adult theater. Problems with police closed the club down for good in 1979, but not before it had launched the careers of the Germs, X, the Go-Go's (yes, those Go-Go's), the Weirdos, the Skulls, the Controllers and more.

After the Masque, Mullen remained in L.A., where he booked shows at various clubs for many years and began writing; he became a regular contributor to the LA Weekly.

His first book was "We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk" (2001, with Marc Spitz), which we included in our list of 46 essential rock reads. He also co-wrote 2002's "Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs" (with Adam Parfrey and Germs band mate Don Bolles). He was the author of the oral history of Jane's Addiction, "Whores," published in 2005, and wrote the text of the fantastic 2007 illustrated history "Live at the Masque: Nightmare in Punk Alley."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Brendan Mullen at the old Masque in 1996. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

John Twelve Hawks will (not exactly) appear

John Twelve Hawks concludes his Fourth Realm trilogy with "The Golden City," which hits shelves Sept. 8. Although he's got an enthusiastic fan following, he won't be going out for any bookstore meet-and-greets. The author has maintained his anonymity since his debut, "The Travelers," was published in Britain in 2004 (it came out in the U.S. a year later).

"John Twelve Hawks" is thought to be a pseudonym, and he -- or she -- has chosen to stay "off the grid," according to a 2005 interview with SFFWorld.com. "It’s an awkward life, but not a difficult one," John Twelve Hawks told the website. "I’m lucky to have a variety of friends who help me."

So with the pressure to publicize a new book, what's an anonymous author to do?

Well, there will be readings, but they'll be conducted by stand-ins. Including Julie Anne Swayze, proprietor of Metropolis Books in downtown L.A., who will declare, "I am John Twelve Hawks" on Sept. 12.

At the reading, which takes place at 4 p.m., the bookstore owner will read from "The Golden City" and hold a raffle for door prizes, including genuine signed editions of the book.

It's John Twelve Hawks' loss that he's not going to make it there. Metropolis Books is just down the block from The Nickel Diner, home of the famous maple-glazed bacon doughnut -- which is so good, it should be able to get anyone to come out of hiding.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Hayden Childs -- who is not, as far as we know, John Twelve Hawks -- reads at Metropolis Books in 2008. Credit: Carolyn Kellogg

Raymond Chandler's 'Double Indemnity' cameo

For more than 50 years, Raymond Chandler sat unnoticed in a hallway in "Double Indemnity," neglected by film fans and readers alike. But the Guardian has reported that earlier this year, two careful watchers -- one American, one French -- each discovered what they thought to be Raymond Chandler making a secret cameo.

"It's just unmistakeably him. I'd lay money on it," says Judith Freeman, author of "The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved."

While researching her Chandler biography, Freeman never once saw mention of the appearance in Chandler's papers, not at the Bodleian Library in Oxford or at UCLA. "Believe me, I really combed over both archives," she said. But she watched the film again. "And sure enough, by damn, there he was, and in my mind there is absolutely no question that it's Chandler."

Chandler had a notoriously prickly relationship with Billy Wilder; while the two were adapting James M. Cain's novel for the screen, Chandler wrote a memo complaining about the director to studio honchos. But, Freeman notes, "Chandler rather enjoyed the shooting of the film, being on the set."  Perhaps his cameo appearance shows that the author and director eventually patched things up.

What would be the reason for slipping Chandler, the screenwriter, into the film? Cameo appearances go back to the silent film era; Alfred Hitchcock's first was in his 1927 film "The Lodger." That same year, Elinor Glyn -- a novelist-turned-screenwriter with a knack for publicity -- made an appearance in "It," which she wrote. So writers made it on screen.

But Glyn's walk-through was trumpeted by the film's interstitial titles. Chandler's was a secret for decades.

We will probably never know whose idea it was it to put Chandler in front of the camera, or if it took a few drinks to get him in the mood. And no one has successfully deciphered the cover of what he's reading, which would be nice to know too.

According to the Guardian, this is only the second known appearance of Raymond Chandler on film. And it's been right there, all this time.

Sounds like a good noir plot.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: Screen capture from "Double Indemnity." Credit: Universal Pictures