Before becoming one of Los Angeles’s leading noir writers, Hirahara worked as a historian and as an editor for The Rafu Shimpo, the Japanese American bilingual daily newspaper based in Little Tokyo. Her fiction is filled with revelatory details from the past, often dealing with aftermath of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. A persistent theme: the struggle of former detainees to rebuild their lives after imprisonment at Manzanar, Gila River, and other concentration camps from 1942 to 1945.
Crown City also makes skillful use of history, but it reaches back to Pasadena in 1903, four decades before World War II…
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Kirk Fox’s Palmdale, set in the present day, offers a very different but equally incisive portrait of Southern California. The author’s story moves from the high desert around Palmdale to the wealthy hills of Bel Air and the flatlands of the San Fernando Valley. He brings the same geographical/social alertness to his chosen territory as Hirahara brings to Pasadena. The author calls the novel “a dirtbag noir,” and a deep strain of satire runs through it. Its opening page establishes the tone: “The sun had recently set into the sea out past Manhattan Beach somewhere. Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Bel Air, and the rest of the Bugatti Beltway opened wine and impatiently awaited DoorDash.”
…Many chapter titles take their names from local neighborhoods and cities—Van Nuys, Northridge, Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Burbank, Glendale, Venice, and Lancaster—which gives the novel the feel of a disreputable regional atlas.