There's Something You Don't Know About Los Angeles...
...my next book will reveal the secret
The Los Angeles neighborhood of West Adams Heights has a surreal quality to it. It’s on a hill with a view of the sprawling city it belongs to. The homes are grand, the most impressive ones are mansions…but they are mansions that look worn, some abandoned. And the 10 freeway slices right through the middle of the neighborhood like a knife’s scar across the face of a pampered debutant. The freeway just doesn’t seem to belong there.
That’s because it doesn’t. The neighborhood was split apart and torn up in the 1950s in order to make room for that freeway. Palatial homes were taken by eminent domain and destroyed.
Usually it’s poor minority neighborhoods that suffer that kind of fate. In the mid-20th century, West Adams Heights was anything but poor.
But it was a minority neighborhood.
In the 1930s and 40s West Adams Heights was home to Black business moguls, Black hoteliers, Black oil tycoons and Black movie stars. All of them came from nothing. All of them rose to become some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the city. Hattie McDaniel lived there and she would host massive parties attended by the likes of Lena Horne, Bing Crosby, Dinah Washington and Clark Gable. She would hire Duke Ellington as her entertainment.
Inspired by the Black renaissance in Harlem, the residents of this rarefied pocket of L.A. rechristened their neighborhood as their very own Sugar Hill.
Until a few years ago I hadn’t known about any of this. Most people still don’t.
But they should. Not just because the loss of this neighborhood is part of our history, but because of the neighborhood’s decades of success. Long before the Civil Rights Act was even a dream, there was a small population of African Americans who defied all the odds, grabbed the American Dream by its throat and made it their own. And they lived together in one place. Amongst them there were rivalries and love affairs, scandals and triumphs.
It’s a story that needs to be told. So I’m telling it in the best way I know how. I’ve used this rarified real-world setting and time to write a Black version of The Great Gatsby.
I didn’t write a story about what happened in the 1950s when the government found a rather mundane method to destroy what was created. Instead I set my story in 1945. I did that because I wanted to write about what was there and created before the destruction. Because creation is always so much harder and more interesting than demolition.
The ancillary characters are all fictionalized versions of real people. Hattie McDaniel, Lena Horne, Esther Williams, Clark Gable, Black business mogul and entrepreneur Norman Houston, Doctors Vada and John Alexander Somerville who built and briefly ran The Dunbar Hotel otherwise known as the Black Waldorf Astoria.
But the main characters? Those are completely fictional and inspired by the characters of Fitzgerald’s seminal work.
I’ve fallen in love with every one of them
My Daisy is Marguerite (French speakers will get the connection between the names). A black woman who left her poor, rural Virginia home at a young age with her family and eventually landed in Los Angeles where she found her beauty and charms could be used to get her into the highest echelons of L.A. Black society.
Marguerite is married to Terrance who is my Tom. But unlike Tom, Terrance truly is a self-made man. He grew up in the slums but managed to get himself into an elite university and then rose to the position of VP at the most successful Black owned insurance company in the country. He is not interested in lifting others up unless it benefits him. But he is very ready to ruthlessly bring down anyone he perceives as a threat to his status and success.
Anna is my Jordan. She’s a publicist to Hollywood’s most renowned Black celebrities as well as a freelance journalist for L.A.’s black newspapers. She is pragmatic, strong and sees people as they are, not who they pretend to be.
Charlie is my Nick. The son of sharecroppers, he is a self-educated avid reader who is freshly back from the war where he was a medic for the 761st Tank Battalion, known colloquially as The Black Panthers. After receiving a friendly letter his long-lost cousin Marguerite he decides to leave the Jim Crow laws of Virginia and join her and her family in Los Angeles’ West Adams Heights. It’s through his eyes that we marvel at the gilded opulence of L.A.’s Black elite. He simply didn’t know there were people who looked like him who lived like this. And he didn’t know there were women of any color as sexy, smart and successful as Anna. The attraction between these two is instantaneous.
My Jay Gatsby is James “Reaper” Mann. James is an alluring enigma for everyone he meets. Ridiculously wealthy, affable, secretive and at rare moments, threatening. James is someone who everyone wants to know more about. He’s perfectly polite to his neighbors but there’s only one person who he is truly obsessed with. It’s an obsession that could destroy the entire Sugar Hill community. That’s why the novel is titled, The Great Mann.
And while all these dramas are going on there are the white neighbors who are actively trying to use racist laws and brutal means to destroy them all.
This is a very different kind of novel for me. Writing it was absolutely thrilling. I hope reading it will be too.
The book comes out June 3rd, 2025.
You can find out more about it here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/776368/the-great-mann-by-kyra-davis-lurie/
I've added to my Goodreads shelf. Can't wait to read!
I can't wait.