Fredric Brown’s 1962 crime novel, The Murderers, takes place in Los Angeles around 1960. Willy Griff, a twenty-seven year old struggling actor, lives in the basement of a boarding house known as the Zoo. Griff and his friend Charlie, who lives upstairs, eke out a living with bit parts on TV and in film, plus an occasional television commercial.

The other inmates of the house, as Griff calls them, are mostly beatniks and misfits who have no interest in making a traditional living. They drink, play music, read bad poetry aloud, have sex and generally live the kind of carefree, bohemian life that the squares of the suburbs would never approve of.