Recommended Books

While New York and San Francisco may be better known for their cosmopolitan literary icons, San Diego is no slouch when it comes to colorful characters, bigger-than-life biographies, hard-core history, and famous fiction.

Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's classic detective, spent most of his time in the literary Los Angeles of the 1940s. But the last Marlowe mystery, Playback (Vintage Books, 1988), includes a beautiful woman who hides out in "Esmeralda" (actually La Jolla), a coastal town north of downtown San Diego, where Chandler spent his last 13 years of life.

Another hard-boiled type, cop-turned-novelist Joseph Wambaugh, has called San Diego home for more than 15 years. In the early 1970s, his novels The New Centurions and The Onion Field profoundly altered the way law enforcement was portrayed and perceived in this country. Three of Wambaugh's later works -- Floaters (Bantam, 1997), Lines and Shadows (Bantam, 1995), and Finnegan's Week (Bantam, 1994) -- are set in San Diego.

The 1980 film starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour may have moved the story from the Hotel del Coronado to a turn-of-the-20th-century hotel in Mackinac Island, Michigan, but Somewhere in Time (St. Martin's Press, 1999), penned by master thriller novelist Richard Matheson -- also known for A Stir of Echoes (Tor Books, 1999) and What Dreams May Come (Tor Books, 1998) -- is one of the most famous stories set in San Diego to date. Originally published in 1975 under the title Bid Time Return (Buccaneer Books, 1995), this science-fiction-slanted romantic fantasy works not only as a love story, but as a vivid travelogue of Southern California and Coronado.

Coronado also figures in L. Frank Baum's Oz books, including The Wizard of Oz (Tor Books, 1995). The author, who lived in Coronado, based some of his descriptions of the Emerald City on it. Another San Diego local, Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), wrote many of his much-loved children's books while living in La Jolla (The Sneetches, in fact, is a poke at snobby La Jollans).

The Pump House Gang (Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1999), a psychedelic collection of 1960s essays by Tom Wolfe, is named for the often-crazy coterie of expert surfers that hung out at La Jolla's Windansea beach; the eponymous short story vividly captures a sense of place and of an entire generation.

Max Miller, a reporter for the San Diego Sun during the Depression, wrote the runaway 1932 best seller I Cover the Waterfront (Barricade Books, 2003). Miller was the archetypal hard-drinking beat reporter of the time, but his book sketched wonderful tales of the city's seedy waterfront, fishermen, brothels, and sailors.

Design buffs should check out the beautiful coffee-table books highlighting the career of architect Irving Gill: Marvin Rand's Irving J. Gill Architect 1870-1936 (Gibbs Smith, 2006) and Thomas S. Hines' Irving Gill and the Architecture of Reform: A Study in Modernist Architectural Culture (Monacelli, 2000). A protégé of Louis Sullivan, Gill became one of California's most important architects, whose works remain local landmarks. You can find those Gill masterpieces, and many other important structures, in the useful guidebook San Diego Architecture by Dirk Sutro (San Diego Architectural Foundation, 2002).

Mission San Luis Rey in northern San Diego County inspired the setting for Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel, Ramona: A Story (Signet, 2002). A love story that holds up even with today's jaded audiences, Jackson's tale incorporates a changing California (the fading Spanish order, the decline of Native American tribes, the arrival of white settlers) into its enduring drama. The Estudillo House in Old Town is sometimes called "Ramona's House" because it so closely resembles the vivid description in the book.

The brother-and-sister team of E. W. and Ellen Browning Scripps were responsible for the establishment of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, early funding of the San Diego Zoo, creating Torrey Pines State Park, and leaving a permanent imprint on the community of La Jolla. In Edward Willis and Ellen Browning Scripps: An Unmatched Pair (Image Books, 1990), Charles Preece offers the best biography of these two pillars of San Diego's philanthropic Scripps family.

The dark history of class and power in the city is provided in Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See (New Press, 2003), by Mike Davis (author of City of Quartz), Kelly Mayhew, and Jim Miller. From the shady transactions of John D. Spreckels to the Ponzi schemes of C. Arnholt Smith in the '70s, the team dissects the city's militarized economy, its Republican movers and shakers, and its embrace of racial segregation. It's an anti-tourism guidebook out to deflate the city's fun-in-the-sun mythology. Miller is also editor of Sunshine/Noir (City Works Press, 2005), a collection of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, all focused on the San Diego/Tijuana region; his first novel, Drift (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), weaves its story through the region's history, as well.

For something a bit frothier, local restaurateur Ingrid Croce has assembled The San Diego Restaurant Cookbook (Avalanche, 2005). Featuring more than 300 recipes from dozens of the city's best eateries, the cookbook is a salute to San Diego's burgeoning foodie scene.