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However inadvertently, Himess caricature of the local red conspiracy in Lonely Crusade also prefigured the emergence of an anticommunist noir in the Korean War years. While the Hollywood Inquisition was cutting down the careers of a majority of the writers, directors and producers of hardcore film noir, a redbaiting, bastard offspring - frequently set in Los Angeles - appeared on the B-movie circuit (for example, Stakeout on 101) and the drugstore paperback-rack (Mickey Spillanes sado-McCarthyite thrillers). Meanwhile through the 1950s, Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) continued to churn out reasonably well-written detective noir in a Chandleresque mode, usually with some pointed contrast between the primitive beauty of the Southern California seacoast and the primitive greed of its entrepreneurs.57 A major revival of noir occurred in the 1960s and 1970s as a new generation of emigr writers and directors revitalized the anti-myth and elaborated it fictionally into a comprehensive counter-history. Thus Robert Towne (influenced by Chandler and West) brilliantly synthesized the big landgrabs and speculations of the first half of the twentieth century in his screenplays for Chinatown and The Two Jakes. Where Chinatown established a 1920s genealogy for 1930s and 1940s noir, The Two Jakes and John Gregory Dunnes True Confessions extrapolated it into the postwar suburban boom; while Ridley Scotts Blade Runner (cleverly reworking the plot of Philip K. Dicks Do Androids Dream o f Electric Sheep?) depicted a stunningly Chandleresque Los Angeles of the third millennium. More recently, Ray Bradbury, returning to the genre for the first time in forty years, has softboiled noir in an unabashedly nostalgic mode to recall Venice Beach of the 1950s - before urban renewal and gentrification - in his Death is a Lonely Business (1985). Parallel to this project of a noir history of Los Angeless past and future (which actually has come to function as a surrogate public history), other writers in the 1960s re-experienced the moral chill that shivered down the spines of Cains and Wests anti-heroes. John Rechys City o f the Night ( 1963) captured, from the standpoint of its gay Lost Angels, the image of the city as a fugitive midnight hustle - the world of Lonely America squeezed into Pershing Square between anonymous sex acts and gratuitous police brutality. But where Rechy could ultimately find a certain nihilistic exhilaration along the shore where the sun gives up and sinks into the

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