Between those two years, stands the literary legacy of Douglas Anne Munson, one that started late and ended much too soon. In approximately eight years, she wrote four books, all well received. One of those books would not be published until four years after her death.

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She was born in Tennessee in 1948 and moved frequently during childhood. Her family finally settled in southern California. She told a newspaper once she felt like she’d been raised by wolves.

Douglas attended college in New Mexico—studying Latin American studies—then lived briefly in Ecuador before attending law school at UCLA.

Most of her legal career was spent working for the Los Angeles County dependency courts. She was part of a team assigned to determine the best interests of children who had suffered abuse, neglect, or abandonment. The job took its toll. She drank heavily, lived on the edge. The cancer turned that around: she started shaping the horrors she witnessed daily—and the demons of her own past—into fiction.

Satisfaction would always elude her, even when praise and recognition validated the talent her father insisted she lacked; she always felt it was a mistake, that she was a fraud. Despite the lack of support or encouragement she received, Douglas dedicated her first book to her mother and father, and also to Maryse—Maryse Holder, whose book Give Sorrow Words was a major influence.

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In Dogtown and Soultown, Douglas/Mercedes delivers the classic noir double-punch: character and milieu. She appropriated the mean streets of Los Angeles from Raymond Chandler and handed them over to a young, naïve attorney barely able to pay the rent who is haunted by the voice of a reproachful father, and a street-wise Chicana prostitute with a young son, a violent brother, and a encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood’s golden age.

The friction between these protagonists reflects the cultural disharmony of a city. She saw Los Angeles as the epicenter of clashing cultures in America. Violent crime draws them into new worlds that exist—often unseen—in the midst of the world we think we know. The more impenetrable these sub-cultures seem to be, the more we begin to recognize common themes: abuse and exploitation of the innocent, the burdens of family, the tyrannical hold of the past, the struggle for autonomy, the corruption of power, the power of corruption, and fickle promise of love.

We are not so far apart after all.

Douglas told a magazine reporter in 1996: “Sometimes, I’ll be staring at the blank page and realize that 40 minutes south down the 405, a Vietnamese poet is staring at the blank page, too; to the east, a Jamaican girl makes up a song and the black girls dance; north, an Iranian family prays; and somewhere near Hoover, a very elegant Peruvian gentleman cuts a deck of cards. We will never hear of one another, but together our words are creating the myth that is Los Angeles.”

Douglas helped us to hear of one another.

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