1970s

The 1970s are the unsettled present of Doc Sportello’s investigations: a period in which old arrangements survive under new names, trust grows harder to extend, and public institutions can turn private interests into official outcomes. The decade’s defining condition is not simply change but the persistence of earlier histories inside contemporary land use, policing, and political power.

A present shadowed by the past

The novel places the decade against the legacy of exclusion in Gordita Beach. After a Black family tried to move there shortly after the Second World War, townspeople, with advice from the Ku Klux Klan, burned the family’s home site; the lot remained empty until the town confiscated it and made it a park. By the time Doc’s Black visitor comes to his office, that history still shapes who is considered out of place. A Black motorist in town had recently prompted calls for police backup, a task force, and roadblocks along Pacific Coast Highway. The park, where local young people gather at night, stands as an ironic consequence of the earlier violence: a public place created on ground from which a family had been driven.

The decade also carries forward a changing relationship between people and the land. Aunt Reet, a real-estate agent with detailed knowledge of property from the desert to the sea, understands that deeds and contracts cannot capture everything: family resentments, matrimonial histories, and the ways water has flowed or once flowed. Her sense of place reaches beyond formal records, even as she imagines a future in which computers might retrieve a lot’s history, including Spanish land grants, water rights, mortgages, and encumbrances. Her account makes the period’s modernizing confidence uneasy: information may become easier to retrieve, but the underlying histories remain difficult to settle.

Everyday caution and fraying trust

For Doc, the transition from the psychedelic 1960s to the 1970s offers little reassurance. In the course of an investigation, he suspects that Deputy District Attorney Penny Kimball knows more than she has disclosed. Her professional reserve leaves him uncertain whether she is protecting the case, her own position, or information he has not been given. The scene makes distrust practical rather than abstract: Doc must work with people whose knowledge may be partial, and he cannot assume that cooperation means candor.

A family memory provides a contrasting measure of time. Doc’s parents, Leo Sportello and Elmina Breeze, met at an annual outdoor rummy game in Ripon in 1934. Leo worked at a winery whose fortified product was called Midnight Special; he brought it when courting Elmina, and her father eventually bought it by the case. Doc’s first taste of wine came from that family history. Set beside the uncertainty of his present, this remembered courtship shows an earlier social world transmitted through anecdote and habit, without implying that its apparent simplicity can be recovered in the 1970s.

Policing, informants, and institutional interests

The decade’s political history is visible in the Los Angeles Police Department’s use of police reservists. Fritz tells Doc that some of the license plates Doc supplied belong to reservists who joined during the Watts uprising; according to Fritz, they have since served as a private militia used when the department wants to avoid public scrutiny. He gives Doc the numbers but tells him not to report what happens next. The exchange turns investigation into a guarded transfer of information: even a helpful contact protects himself by limiting what he knows about Doc’s response.

Bigfoot’s review of Coy Harlingen’s case reveals a different, wider web of institutional involvement. He brings out a bundle of deteriorated papers and finds that Coy used multiple aliases and was handled by several offices, often simultaneously. Some of the agencies involved, Bigfoot says, would not have minded if Coy had ended up dead. Yet the case was not formally treated as a homicide, so the usual progress reports were never required; on its face, it could be counted as an overdose and a cleared case. The distinction between what the file records and what the investigation suggests is central to the decade’s atmosphere: official categories can close a matter without resolving what happened.

The same incentive structure reaches into the ending of the investigation involving Adrian Prussia and Puck Beaverton. Bigfoot explains that the department is content to treat the identification of Vinnie’s murderer as justice served, while the resulting clearance-rate increase brings millions more in federal funds. He says Adrian had become too conspicuous, but refuses to explain further. In this account, a case’s institutional value is measured not only by truth or accountability but by the number that can be reported and the money it attracts. The 1970s emerge as a period in which competing local histories and interests resist any single reassuring account of progress.