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(Notes: HtR13 is Death Note: How to Read: 13, a supplementary volume to the Death Note manga; it functions as a guidebook to the series. Its publication, after the end of the manga's weekly print run, was the first time L's full name was revealed. The True Name Card is a portrait card, depicting L and his name, that came with the book. Tsugumi Ohba is the writer of the manga, Takeshi Obata is the illustrator, and NISIOISIN is the author of Another Note.)
Detailed Personal History:
L doesn't have much canon history; any player has to invent his youth with the few details we're given. It's not even certain that he's an orphan, though it's strongly suggested, and sorting through the truth, fiction, and gaping holes is made more difficult by the fact that most of what he says to Light Yagami about his own history is likely to be a lie.
Nothing is known of the first eight years of his life, and the timeline after that is sparse except where the events of Another Note and Death Note come in. The manner of his parents' death isn't that important; it's not established in canon, so sometimes I play "car accident" and other times I play "house fire." There are other possibilities as well. I usually choose a no-fault accident, because L is not actually supposed to have a deep personal thirst and drive for justice, and depicting his parents as having been murdered, etc., might tend to suggest otherwise.
Therefore, what follows is a reconstruction of possibilities, in which we can find a life story for L that makes the most sense in real-world terms when built on the information we have. Even his biography requires conjecture and informed deduction; this is an irony that he would appreciate.
L Lawliet was born on October 31, 1979. His ancestry is one-quarter each English, Russian, Japanese, and "French or Italian." The surname Lawliet, which seems most likely to be a northern French or Norman French name when its "low-light" pronunciation is taken into account, dictates that French is a better guess.
He first appears on the scene as a parentless child in the Winchester area of England. This suggests that he was either born in the United Kingdom, or brought there by his parents before their deaths; it seems unrealistic that a young boy, even a clever one, could travel over international borders with ease.
"L" isn't short for anything; it's shown on the True Name Card included with HtR13, in a font indicating that it's what would be seen by someone with the Shinigami Eyes. In other words, it's the name he was given when he was born. Because he seems to have no concern that anyone will identify him through his uncommon first name, my guess is that he was orphaned at a young age, rather than abandoned, and has no close living relatives; his air of aloofness when interacting with others is consistent with this theory.
To say that he was born in Paris to a Franco-Russian father and an Anglo-Japanese mother, that he was brought to the UK as a toddler, that his parents died in a car accident when he was five, that he spent some time recovering from his own injuries, and that he was then in the care of the state for several years -- all of this is as good a guess as any.
While in care in a children's home, he was neither abused nor favored. His caregivers meant well, but didn't know what to do with him. He seemed like a weird, secretive, solemn, obsessive child, reasonably pleasant in manner without being ingratiating, obviously far ahead of his peers in intellectual terms, with a drive to excel, an endless curiosity, and an unsettling ability to lie without betraying any sign of it. Some of the other children were afraid of him, his targeted tactlessness and occasional veiled threats, the way he would calmly turn any attempts made to bully him back around on the unfortunate perpetrators. If asked about these things as an adult, he would describe most of it as survival mechanisms -- in the unlikely event that he would be willing to discuss it at all.
At some point in late 1987 or early 1988, L helped solve the Winchester Mad Bomber case; his participation brought him to the attention of Quillish Wammy, a wealthy inventor/philanthropist. Their association was to change L's life completely. While it's likely that he would have found a way to excel in some field on his own, Wammy's apparent interest in creating skilled investigators with training beginning in early childhood gave L the kind of support and resources that would enable him to use his gifts in a more immediate way, as a prodigy.
We have no information supporting a guess about the age at which L began to work full-time as L-the-detective. Just before the tennis match scene in Death Note, he told Light that he had once lived in England for about five years; he also told him that he had been the British Junior Tennis Champion, but that that information would not help uncover his identity.
It's impossible to tell how truthful L was in that scene. Therefore, the timeline can go in at least two possible directions: if the five years has any significance, either it describes a passage of time between when his parents brought him to the UK, some time after he was 3, and when he left it to begin working, or it describes the amount of time he spent both being educated to at least a university level and solving cases before transitioning to full-time work, from 8 to 13. The latter seems more likely.
Either way, because L had been aimed completely at investigative work, and because he seemed to find it fulfilling enough to act as a satisfying proxy for a normal life, it's unlikely that he was ever a national champion in any sport at any level. Achievements at that level require a dedication which he appears to only be capable of showing to his cases, and a young boy, even a prodigy, probably couldn't accomplish both. One of the activities is a consuming passion, and the other seems like something he wouldn't do if he didn't have to. It's therefore likely that L's tennis training all happened during the course of the Kira case itself, many years later.
*****
Years passed, and as he grew up, L established himself as the world's greatest detective at a young age.
We know that he was never a resident of Wammy's House, a children's home that Quillish Wammy founded to identify and support other profoundly gifted children; its secret aim was to find someone capable of taking over L's work, if he should be killed or incapacitated. The first two candidates were given the code names A and B, and for his own safety, L, that anthill's particular lump of honey, was kept well away from them.
A cracked under the pressure of the training and killed himself, probably when L was still a teenager. If the suicide had any effect on L, he would have been unlikely to show it.
Between 1988 and 2004, L solved over 3500 difficult cases, amassing impressive personal wealth in the process. His existence was not well-known to the public, but within the worldwide law enforcement community, he became a legend: an investigator specializing in unsolveable cases, picky about those he'd agree to tackle, with an incomparable love for justice. This reputation was not entirely accurate, but it was what he wished to project.
In point of fact, he acquired underworld contacts -- observant professionals like a charming con man, Aiber, and a skilled thief, Wedy -- and began to use them in his work when necessary. He also acquired, among many others, the aliases "Eraldo Coil" and "Deneuve" from the people who had been considered the world's second- and third-best detectives before they made the mistake of crossing him. The acquisition of aliases was accomplished through "detective wars," in which the defeated investigator was forced to surrender the identity they had used to interact with the world.
B was another matter. More and differently unstable than A, he soon turned his training on its ear and began to make studied attempts at replacing L in a complete sense, mimicking what he knew of L's appearance and mannerisms. When he reached adulthood -- old enough to appear to be a man, but not as old as 22-year-old L -- he left Wammy's House, with the intention of making his mark.
It took a few months for B to resurface in Los Angeles, as both the perpetrator of a series of murders that were baroque in their complexity, and an "investigator" working on the case. B's plan was an elaborate, grisly hoax in which the killer would be impossible to catch because he would also be the last victim; it was thwarted thanks to L's chosen proxy, a tough young FBI agent named Naomi Misora, who was able to interrupt B's attempt at self-immolation and arrest him.
Later, after paying her well, L engineered a situation that functioned as an anonymous meeting in which he thanked Naomi for her help. The case was important to him on a personal level; it's obvious that he felt, in some way, that it was his mess to clean up.
Through it all, L continued to work at a tireless pace. We can't be sure how he lived. It may have been in modest surroundings, clean simple spaces with large windows that held him and the technical equipment, mostly computers, that he needed to do his work; conversely, it may have been a series of suites in luxury hotels. A mixture of both, depending on the circumstances of a given case, seems most likely.
His ability increased over time, and his reputation grew more formidable. Quillish Wammy, who was by this point best-known as Watari, L's handler, alternated between taking care of L's mundane needs and acting in disguise as his liaison with the world's police forces. Watari's assistance allowed L to focus entirely on his cases, rather than on trivialities like laundry and grocery shopping, and L's real identity remained a closely-guarded secret. The Kira case brought him as much into the public eye as he ever would be.
Some time between the end of B's attempted "detective war" in August, 2002, and the beginning of the Kira case in late November, 2003, probably closer to the latter, L decided to do an interview with the young residents of Wammy's House. They were gathered in front of a webcam, through which he observed their questions; he answered via audio feed. All went well until L told the children at Wammy's House that "justice" was not his motivation: investigation was an interesting hobby that sometimes required him to work outside the law, or to cheat to defeat an opponent. After this interview, he selected Mello and Near, the only two children who weren't visibly put off by his attitude, as potential successors to his position.
Also, at some point around this time, he met Mello in person and told him the stories of three cases, one of which was his war with B. The circumstances of the meeting are unknown.
*****
In late November, 2003, a brilliant Japanese high school senior named Light Yagami found a shinigami's notebook. The Death Note is the method by which death gods kill humans; it allowed Light to kill anyone whose name and face he knew, by heart attack or any number of other methods, and he began acting as the mass murderer Kira (a corruption of the word "killer"). He decided to use his newfound power to cleanse the world of criminals, creating a perfect society where he could rule like a god. If we were discussing Light, rather than L, we would talk about the reasons why he begins killing. In this story, though, the fact of his vigilantism is more important than its pathology.
When Kira began to murder people, L was one of the first people to notice, to recognize that the bizarre wave of heart attacks in the world's criminal populations might have been related to the similar, slightly earlier death of a hostage-taker. He was on the case even before Interpol decided to ask him to take a look at it, identifying Kira's probable location and working out a test to confirm it.
The test was a live television broadcast shown only in the Tokyo metropolitan area. A condemned criminal, Lind L. Tailor, sat at a desk and pretended to be L, issuing a speech condemning Kira's actions. The moment Tailor stated that Kira's actions were evil, a furious, maniacal Light scribbled his name in the Death Note, and he died of a heart attack 40 seconds later; afterward, L broke into the broadcast via audio feed to taunt and challenge the murderer. Light's inability to kill him based only on his voice helped prove that Kira required a name and a face.
A few weeks passed, in which L worked quietly in an anonymous room in Tokyo, while Watari and a linked computer acted as his face and voice in the office of the Kira task force at Japan's National Police Agency headquarters. His relationship with the members of the large team was marked by mutual distrust: many of the officers felt that L's anonymity, in the face of the risks involved with openly investigating the case, was unfair. For his part, L became aware that Kira was receiving leaks of classified NPA information.
L brought FBI agents in from the US to investigate the officers who still remained on the team; to his dismay, all of the agents were murdered by Kira, and American authorities ceased to cooperate in the investigation. Naomi Misora, who had been engaged to one of the agents, also went missing. The NPA team dwindled to just a few officers (one of whom was Soichiro Yagami, Light's father, the oblivious source of the leaks), and at this point, L agreed to work with them in person, relocating to a hotel suite and arranging a meeting.
L had considered everything: police badges with false names, an emergency call system, the idea of changing hotels every few days to keep investigation details from being leaked, the fact that the few remaining team members were probably trustworthy. At this point, though, clues began to point to the Yagami family in a direct line. His profile of Kira, as well as Light's ability to look perfectly innocent under surveillance in a way that suggested that he was trying too hard, caused L to settle on Light as the best suspect in the case.
From this point on, regardless of what Light did to try to shift suspicion away from himself, no other "good" leads exonerated him in L's eyes. Criminals continued to die by the thousands. L came to the conclusion that he would be unable to close the case without understanding Kira's method of killing and seeing him commit a murder, so he decided to insinuate himself into Light's daily life, to observe him at close range. While L disliked Light on a personal level, Kira was profoundly interesting, and a "friendship" wasn't difficult to establish or feign, particularly with several months of time to prepare for it.
The University of Tokyo is the most prestigious institution of its kind in Japan; To-Oh is Death Note's stand-in for it. L took To-Oh's entrance examination in January, 2004. He tied for first place with Light, then began classes in April, meeting Light on the first day. For strategic reasons, he chose as an alias the name of a famous singer/actor, Hideki Ryuuga, but also immediately revealed himself to Light as L.
Soon after, he challenged Light to a tennis match as a way of both profiling him and establishing a closer relationship. It seems likely that L spent the three months after identifying Light in learning everything there was to know about him, looking for a place where common ground could be exploited; the tennis match itself was intended mostly as an ice-breaker. Afterward, L explained to Light that he was a suspect, vastly understated the degree of his suspicion, and used a combination of real and fake evidence to test him. Nothing concrete could be established.
Due to complications in the case -- the arrival on the scene of a copycat Kira who could kill without knowing someone's name thanks to the Shinigami Eyes -- L then stopped attending classes. This "Second Kira" case occupied him from late April to late July, 2004; he theorized that the culprit was someone who wanted to meet Kira, and involved Light in the investigation as a way of testing and observing him.
In late May, a pretty young model, Misa Amane, formed an obsessional attachment to Light; that, her background, and forensic evidence linking her to tapes sent to a television station by the Second Kira all enabled L to have her arrested.
A complicated situation developed in which Misa refused to crack under days of mild torture, Light came in and asked to be imprisoned on the basis that he might be acting as Kira without knowledge of it, and Soichiro Yagami asked to be imprisoned in support of his son. As part of Light's plan to exonerate himself, he and Misa gave up ownership of their Death Notes and the memories attached to them, making it impossible for L to achieve much through interrogation. A new Kira began to kill again while all three people were being held. After a final test to see if Misa would be able to kill to save Light's life in an emergency situation, L was forced to release them to less restrictive custody.
This custody turned out to be in a lavish office tower that L had commissioned as a new headquarters for the investigation. Misa was allowed to resume her career, under surveillance, but L wanted to observe Light as closely and personally as possible. From late July through late October, the two were handcuffed together at all times, with a chain between them for freedom of movement. L was frustrated and depressed by the idea that he might have been wrong, bored by a lack of fresh clues, and sulking about all of it. Many things, such as Light's evident hacking skills, seemed to support L's suspicions.
The months were spent investigating the new Kira and attempting to learn how the power to kill could have moved on from Light and Misa. In the end, Light drew L's attention to a pattern of murders beneficial to the Yotsuba corporation, and it wasn't long before they were on the trail of a group of young executives who held secret meetings determining whose deaths would advance Yotsuba's cause.
At this time, a variety of internal and external issues caused fissures between the NPA team and L. Political pressure caused the remaining team members to leave the NPA, with L's financial support; however, some members resented his manipulations, and there was disagreement about how to proceed with the case. Aiber and Wedy came in to assist with infiltrating Yotsuba.
Eventually, an endgame was created. Kyosuke Higuchi, the Yotsuba Kira, was captured on October 28th, then immediately killed by Light. L got his hands on Light's old Death Note, but Light got his memory and powers back as its full owner... something that didn't bode well for L. The notebook contained several fake rules that seemed to exonerate Light and Misa; it also came attached to Rem, a shinigami with an emotional connection to Misa.
L was forced to release Light from close observation. Even after removing the handcuffs, he noticed Light's unwillingness to leave the notebook, and began to try to think of ways to test the false rules that were derailing his case. Outwardly, L was placid, but he wondered feverishly what to do: how to prove what he knew about Light, once and for all, without being killed for his trouble.
L died of a heart attack on November 5th, 2004, after stating his intention to test the fake rules on condemned prisoners. Rem killed him, along with Quillish Wammy and herself, to protect Misa from execution for her crimes.
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