Picture a strip mall in Van Nuys at eleven in the morning. A vape shop, a donut shop, a notary, a teriyaki place with a health grade that took some negotiating, and a nail salon whose signage promises, ambitiously, SERENITY. The light is doing that flat white thing the Valley does, where every surface looks like it’s been photographed for evidence. Nothing is hiding. Nothing could hide. There is no fog, no shadow, no atmosphere at all in the meteorological or literary sense.

Somewhere in that paragraph, a crime is happening. I’d argue it’s the best possible place for one.

The Postcard Problem

Crime fiction, as a genre, has expensive taste in real estate. Brunetti gets Venice. Rebus gets Edinburgh’s wynds and closes. Morse gets the spires of Oxford, where even the murders have a college affiliation. And the classic LA noir tradition, for all its cynicism, runs on glamour too: the canyon houses, the studio lots, the hotel bars where doomed people drink beautifully. The settings arrive pre-loaded with menace. Fog on cobblestones is doing half the writer’s job before a single body drops.

I understand the appeal. Atmosphere is free money. But I want to put in a word for the other landscape, the one nobody photographs for the book jacket: the strip mall, the office park, the boardwalk in October, the sun-bleached intersection with four gas stations and no pedestrians. The places with no dignity to lose.

Fog Is Optimistic

Here’s the case. Fog implies a secret. It tells the reader that the truth is out there, obscured, waiting for a detective with a good coat to walk into it. Fog is, in its way, optimistic.

Flat sunlight implies nothing. It shows you everything and the everything is a vape shop. When a crime happens in a place like that, there’s no atmospheric excuse for it, no gothic architecture to blame, nothing between the reader and the plain fact of what people do to each other. Raymond Chandler understood this decades ago when he located dread not in darkness but in hot dry wind, the kind that makes ordinary people eye the carving knife. The scariest weather in American crime fiction is a sunny day with a forecast for more of the same.

Some of the great American practitioners all figured this out. Carl Hiaasen built a career on the observation that Florida’s true crime scene is the zoning map: the theme parks, the drained swamps, the condo developments with waterfall names. Don Winslow’s border towns. Elmore Leonard’s Detroit, where industrial decline left scars and the dialogue stayed. None of these are postcard places. All of them are more frightening than a castle.

No Dignity, No Cover

There’s a second advantage, and it’s the one that matters most to me as a comic crime writer: an undignified setting strips the characters of cover. In Venice, a criminal can feel like part of a grand tradition. He has predecessors. He has ambiance. Somewhere, a string section is implied. In a strip mall, he’s just a guy in the parking lot of a teriyaki place, sweating through his decisions in full view of the SERENITY sign. The gap between how seriously he takes his scheme and how seriously the landscape takes him is where both the comedy and the horror live. The place refuses to flatter anyone. So nobody in the book gets to be flattered, which is where the truth starts.

My Patch of It

This is a long way of explaining why my detective, Marv Slocum, is from Van Nuys. Not Los Angeles, the brand. Van Nuys, the actual place: the flat, hot, un-photographed middle of the Valley, where noir goes about its business without a costume budget. No Clean Hands is an LA novel in which the LA of the movies barely appears, because Marv’s LA is the unglamorous LA the movies mostly ignore, the part that parks at strip malls. (His office is in one, off Ventura Boulevard. I told you the opening paragraph was a crime scene.) And the crimes there are exactly as serious as crimes anywhere else. More serious, maybe. Nobody’s posing.

And when it came time for Rock Bottom Express, I doubled down and subtracted the skyline. The cover is a canyon with a fire raging far down at the bottom of it. That’s the whole image. An enormous indifferent landscape, an inferno it somehow renders small, and no architecture anywhere offering to make it mean something. You want to know the book’s thesis, it’s right there in the proportions.

The Evidence

Skeptics will want exhibits, so let me submit a few from my own books. In No Clean Hands, a three-day war begins inside a Costco. Not an abandoned warehouse, which would at least be cinematic. A Costco, open for business, where the bulk aisle becomes an armory, where thirty-six rolls of paper towels enter the record as a single thrown object, where a fall that should be fatal is broken by pool noodles and inflatable pool toys, and where, through every second of the gunfire, the store PA keeps playing Huey Lewis, cheerful, unkillable, sonically indifferent to the emergency, because nothing in a big-box store will ever acknowledge that your day is going badly. Stage that scene in a Venetian palazzo and it’s a tragedy. Stage it in a Costco and it’s the truth about America, with a soundtrack.

The same book gives its most solemn eulogy not to a person but to a synthesizer, “The Moog made a sound like a dying god,” and stages one of its explosions from inside the most mundane gesture a car offers: “She reached for the volume. The car exploded.” The lesson keeps repeating. The closer the violence sits to the ordinary, the harder it lands.

By Rock Bottom Express, the doctrine had matured into real estate. That book’s spiritual headquarters is a bar called The Sky Clam, “the kind of bar that made other dive bars feel like wine lounges,” which squats beneath an overpass in Boyle Heights between a check-cashing place robbed so many times they stopped fixing the bulletproof glass and a botanica selling saint candles and curse removal, under a hand-painted sign of a winged clam ascending to heaven, weeping mariachi tears. “Nobody knew what it meant. Nobody asked.” A tank moves through the desert in that book. Cartel money moves through everything. And when Marv finally goes looking for the truth, the truth is drinking at The Sky Clam. Of course it is. In these books the truth always lives at the address with the least dignity, which is how you know it’s the truth.

A Closing Argument for Nowhere

So here’s my pitch to readers, and to any crime writer choosing a setting: trust the unglamorous. A murder in Venice is a tragedy with a view. A murder behind the teriyaki place is just a murder, undiluted, at full strength, in lighting that refuses to look away. The postcard settings make crime picturesque. The parking lots make it true.

And for once the sign-off isn’t only a metaphor. In the places I write about, the landscape offers no commentary, the light explains nothing, and the sky has exactly one thing to say — the same thing it says every cloudless, pitiless day.

Everything else is weather.