Los Angeles, Indiana | Jesse Barron

“When he died last year, Gary Indiana was writing a novel called Remission. The title could refer to the cancer Gary was suffering from as he composed it, but as with most things Gary wrote, the word had multiple meanings and echoes. Gary intended Remission to be similar, on the surface, to the books in his great ‘American crime’ trilogy, at least in the sense that the story would revolve around a real, high-profile case.

The case had started in 2017. That summer, a man died of a meth overdose at an apartment in West Hollywood. The tenant of the apartment, Ed Buck, was a retired businessman turned political activist. The man who died, Gemmel Moore, was a twenty-six-year-old doing sex work. Buck was white, Moore black. The coroner ruled Moore’s death an accident, but a year later, a second man died of an overdose in Buck’s living room, and nine months after that, a third man called the police from a gas station on Santa Monica Boulevard, saying Buck had just given him a too-high shot of meth. Finally, the police arrested Buck, charging him with the two prior deaths, and a judge gave him thirty years. For obvious reasons, this received significant coverage in the media.”

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