A Place to Call Home
Okay, I get it.
Palmdale is not Montreal.
But it is my adopted home; a sleepy tacky uburban town in California’s High Desert that just doesn’t get much respect in crime fiction.
Or in real life.
The city’s motto, “A Place to Call Home,” is supposed to emphasize its quality of life, its diverse housing options, and desirable community environment for its residents.
Uh-huh.
It’s a one-hoss desert town that became “the fastest-growing city in California for most of the 1980s,” but it’s never had much of a reputation. Or at least not much of a good one.
Historian Mike Davis famously took it to task in his City of Quartz (1990), his landmark book on how Los Angeles has been shaped by various forces in its history, decrying how speculative real estate developers “en-gridded to accept the future hordes,” divvying up the desert for suburban expansion, aerospace-driven migration and prisons.
First time I realized this was while watching Accomplice, a 1946 B-flick featuring Los Angeles private eye Simon Lash and his partner Eddie Slocum discuss the possible location of a suspect. When “Palmdale” is suggested, the gasp of astonishment and distaste is immediate — and hilarious.
Turns out the windy little burg is depicted as a sort of backwoods blackhole, inhabited by inbred shady types and mink ranchers.
Since then, there have been only a few other shout-outs.
One is from the 1980 pilot film for Tenspeed and Brown Shoe by Stephen J. Cannell. Flim flam man E.L. “Tenspeed” Turner, talking a mile a minute, bluffs his way into the cockpit of a commercial jetliner about to take off, posing as a flight inspector. Here it is, taken right from the script:
And every now and then, crime fiction serves up another slice of Palmdale dissing.
Rachel Howell Hall‘s We Lie Here (2022), has an asthmatic Los Angeles television writer reluctantly journeying back to her hometown of Palmdale to arrange a party for her parent’s twentieth anniversary, only to uncover more family secrets than she bargained for. Up to and including murder. Barely able to breathe huffing on her inhaler, she feels everything from her own family to the scorched, dusty dry air is conspiring against her, and worn down by her impromptu investigation, she concludes that “the farther Palmdale is behind me, the more my heart beats at a regular pace.”
There’s a sly wink in Honey Don’t!, the 2025 film directed and co-written by Ethan Coen, and starring Margaret Qualley as Honey O’Donahue, a Bakersfield, California eye who definitely likes girls.
After a round of particularly rigorous sex, she asks her partner, “Did you see heaven?”
To which the woman, still glowing from one mother of an orgasm, replies “I saw at least Palmdale.”
Palmdale’s about seventy miles away from Bakersfield.
And the latest dig? 2026’s Palmdale by Kirk Fox, billed as a “dirtbag noir,” which makes no bones about the town. It features two rival local private eyes who get tangled up in the murder of a wealthy heir and enough criminal stupidity to fill an Elmore Leonard novel. Or at least a short story. Palmdale, perhaps not surprisingly, doesn’t not come off too well.
Submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Got anymore? Send ’em along… I’m a big boy. I can take it.
