Introduction
Running away from home is not usually thought of as a crime, but runaway children are costing the police forces of all major American cities immense expenditures of time, money and effort. Every year, more and more minors are finding life at home intolerable and leaving abruptly, frequently with no definite destination in mind. Some of them wind up in communes in the country, but by far the greatest number head for our large metropolises. In the East, New York City is the most popular target. On the West Coast, the majority of runaways go to San Francisco or Los Angeles.
A recent visit to a nearby precinct gave us a shocking insight into how big this problem has become. The bulletin board held forty-two new notices of runaway teenagers, most of them accompanied by photographs of the subjects. Of the total, only five were boys - the other thirty-seven were girls. When we commented on how good-looking many of them were, an officer shook his head wearily. "They probably won't look like that now," he said. "That's why it's so hard to find them. The other reason is there's just too many of them."
When runaways are found, they usually say that they left home because their parents didn't care about them. "They never cared if I was home," a typical youngster said bitterly. "Why should they care if I'm not home?"
Commenting on the situation in his recent book Listening to America, Bill Moyers (former Deputy Director of the Peace Corps and publisher of the influential Long Island newspaper Newsday) said, "Runaways are hardest to find in the people sumps of suburbs like Los Angeles and Long Island, and my effort to locate the missing daughter of my friend in Texas was unsuccessful. In Greenwich Village and Berkeley-even in Washington, D.C., with its Dupont Circle-there are starting points, places where a youth in flight usually gravitates when he first hits town. It is sometimes possible to pick up his trail from members of the small permanent colony that will give him advice about where to go when he moves on. A city has a beginning and an end; suburbs go on forever. They are like a roadmap that continues on the other side and in the turning becomes more confusing to the traveler. There are a hundred centers in the suburbs and no core. If you are lost there, you are lost. It is hard to find anyone in the suburbs."
Mr. Moyers is only one of many writers who have described Los Angeles as a vast cluster of suburbs, and the effect of this on the visitor seeing the place for the first time is frequently a bewildering one. The total city area is 461 square miles, and to enable the population to get around this huge expanse Los Angeles County has the heaviest per-capita concentration of automobiles in the world. The city is famous for the intricate system of freeways that radiate from the center of town to outlying areas. Dozens of independent municipalities are incorporated in the county, some of them completely surrounded by the city. A fifteen-mile bus route may need franchises from as many as six local governments, but there is very little bus service to begin with. Beach areas - particularly attractive to young people and hippies of all ages - in the county are occupied by the municipalities of Malibu, Santa Monica, Venice, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach, Long Beach and Huntington Beach.
Country Girl in Town by Wesley Brighton, Jr., is the story of a runaway who arrives in Los Angeles confused and almost penniless. The home Suzanne Corville has left is not typical; it consists of a poor farm sporadically tended by her scrawny, besotted uncle Tom, who brings Suzanne's life there to a climax when he tries to rape her. But Suzanne is typical in being young, inexperienced, and totally unaware of the many dangers she faces in the big city. Many writers - ranging from crime writers like Dashiell Hammett through more "serious" ones like Nathanael West to the English satirist Evelyn Waugh - have tried to capture and evoke the strange quality of the loneliness an individual can feel in this strange, sometimes beautiful and sometimes ugly sprawl. Hard as it may be for an outsider to believe, it is a feeling unique to this place and no other. And in trying to escape it, Suzanne goes from the frying pan straight into the inferno.
Suzanne moves into an apartment house-a house that looks like thousands of others but contains many strange secrets. She meets two men, Walter Craft and Roger Watlington, who superficially appear to be solid professional types but strike her as somehow furtive and sinister...
But this is a book full of surprises, and we don't want to spoil any of them. It is also a novel about an important segment of modern American society, but one that as a story is utterly unique - as unique as that feeling of Los Angeles loneliness which Wesley Brighton, Jr., describes as well as or better than any other writer so far.