Strong, dry Santa Ana winds fanned the flames along the hillside in Castaic, a neighborhood in northwest Los Angeles County, California, on January 22, 2025. The wind event has long been used as a literary tool by famous authors.APU GOMES/AFP/Getty Images
It was Joan Didion in her 1967 essay, Los Angeles Notebook, who observed that the onset of a Santa Ana wind event is a mood, a queasy, premonitory pit in the stomach.
The winds – the high-pressure system that originates in the Great Basin and then roars through the region’s mountain passes, which recently created the most destructive fires in the city’s history – are something more than a change in the weather. “We know it because we feel it,” Didion writes. “Whenever and wherever a [Santa Ana] blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about ‘nervousness’, about ‘depression.’” It is this notion of the Santa Ana winds charging and changing the atmosphere that makes it such a rich literary device for those writers who have featured the “Devil Wind” in their work.
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In her writing about L.A., Didion was frequently drawn to the stark contrasts of her adopted city, its natural, boundless efflorescence and its unannounced dangers, the perfumed smell of eucalyptus and the bitter taste of smoke. It is this zone of uncertainty that some of L.A.’s greatest writers have inhabited in their work, the feeling of paradise subverted, of nature turning on itself at a moment’s notice.
Author Joan Didion captured the mood of the wind event in her 1967 essay, The Los Angeles Notebook.Kathy Willens/The Associated Press
“Anything can happen” during a Santa Ana event, Raymond Chandler wrote in his 1938 short story Red Wind. Chandler’s bailiwick was the crime genre, and the Santa Ana winds were an augur of physical danger, a kind of toxin that poisoned otherwise rational humans, shoved them toward a wild fatalism. When doom is at the front door, all bets are off.
From the first line of Red Wind, Chandler evokes the edginess brought on by an incipient wind event. “It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that came down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump,” Chandler writes. Red Wind is about murder and deceit, about things concealed and revealed. “On nights like this,” he continues, “every boozy party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the caring knife and study their husband’s necks.” His characters are the wind’s avatars – unmoored, inconstant, erratic.
For Chandler, the winds become a spur to behaviour that boils the blood. Didion, who uses Chandler’s opening line from Red Wind in Los Angeles Notebook, enumerates in her essay a litany of wind-related crimes during one 14-day stretch of bad mojo in 1957: “Six people were killed in automobile accidents … a prominent Pasadena attorney … shot and killed his wife, their two sons, and himself. A South Gate divorcee, twenty-two, was murdered and thrown from a moving car.” The winds are not just swirling around us, they seep through the pores and scramble our sense of reason.
Bret Easton Ellis, who has cited Joan Didion as his literary lodestar, brought the winds to his 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero, a story of disaffected, entitled rich Hollywood kids. The Santa Anas in Ellis’s novel are more like annoying static, an unwanted party crasher. In a morally vacant world where “no one talks about anything much and no one seems to mind,” the Santa Anas are something that happens to other folks less fortunate than them. It is only the book’s protagonist, Clay, who pays attention to the growing rumble of a forceful gust, the eerie portent that threatens to crack his cloistered world wide open. “I stop at a Sambo’s that’s open all night and sit alone in a large empty booth and the winds have started,” Clay muses during one typically aimless night on the town, “and they’re blowing so hard that the windows are shaking and the sounds of them trembling, about to break, fill the coffee shop.”
Clay, like Didion, knows that the wind is a carrier of violence without fear or favour, that it can just as easily sweep away Bel Air mansions as it can destroy homeless encampments. As in Didion’s essay, Clay feels the wind against his cheek and despairingly muses about arbitrary acts of violence: “some twelve-year-old kid who accidentally shot his brother in Chino … a guy in Indio who nailed his kid to a wall … a man who calmly … ran over his ex-wife somewhere near Reno.”
Janet Fitch, a third-generation Los Angeles native, has a more complicated relationship with the Santa Anas. In her 1993 novel White Oleander, the raging turbulence is not something to be ignored or feared, but embraced as part of the region’s cycle of decay and renewal. For Ingrid and her daughter Astrid Magnusson, the wind carries echoes of the past, and summons a blooming of memory. While Ingrid sits in a county lock-up for the crime of murdering her boyfriend, her daughter Astrid traces the lineaments of her former world in the “hot wind smelling of creosote and laurel sumac,” the smoke that “always brought me back to my mother.” Fitch’s protagonists are bound to the wind rather than estranged from it; fire carries with it some of the wildness, danger and heat of the bond between mother and daughter. With Astrid’s mother sentenced to a long prison term for murder, Astrid imagines she is bathed in the Devil Wind’s baptismal fire, “the ash girl, born to these Santa Anas, born to char and aftermath.”
Curiously, the literature of the Santa Anas doesn’t tend to feature cataclysms of the kind that we have just seen in L.A., though Steve Erickson comes close. In his 1985 novel Days Between Stations, Erickson, a bold experimentalist who utilizes extreme temporal and spatial shifts in his work, envisions huge sandstorms kicked up by vicious gusts that cloak themselves over the landscape, tall buildings “scraped raw” from the onslaught, the city occluded by sand. What remains is a ghostly void. “The sky was white all the time,” Erickson writes. “People went out, life in general went on, but it wasn’t clear whether this calm was courage or concession.”
“Courage or concession” is something every Los Angeles resident must negotiate every time the Santa Anas deliver danger. In the aftermath of these horrid tempests, the future of Los Angeles is uncertain. As for its art, we can only wait in the fullness of time to determine how books as yet unwritten will handle what has become the most destructive “Red Wind” Los Angeles has ever witnessed.
