We’ve got National Book Award finalist Susan Straight writing about a group of Rio Seco characters who wash up at a Downtown L.A. bar called the Golden Gopher. Janet Fitch takes us inside a Los Feliz love triangle that evokes the movie Sunset Boulevard, millennial style. Michael Connelly dreams up a classic noir story set on iconic Mulholland Drive, which “rode like a snake” along the city’s backbone, and Robert Ferrigno’s Yancy delivers a soliloquy about a heist gone terribly wrong in Belmont Shore. Neal Pollack visits a gambling casino in the City of Commerce, where a mafioso and his thuggish bodyguards await the unlucky. Los Angeles Noir also marks the fiction debut of KPCC host, NPR commentator, and L.A. Times columnist Patt Morrison, who weighs in with a sly, Celia Brady-like romp through old Beverly Hills, where losing the best table at a top restaurant is akin to a dagger through the heart anywhere else.

There are newer talents as well, like Naomi Hirahara, whose tale of obsession set in a Koreatown day spa evokes Patricia Highsmith. Many of these stories overlap and layer like the city itself, ending, in true L.A. commuter style, far from where they began. The protagonist in Gary Phillips’s story ticks off the changes in his neighborhood-a bar on Wilshire now engulfed by Koreatown, the Ambassador Hotel where Robert F. Kennedy was shot falling to the wrecker’s ball, his own Mid-City streets invaded by cacti-planting, Southwest-decorating homeowners-as if to ground himself amidst an ever-shifting reality. Brian Ascalon Roley’s working-class Mar Vista families watch uneasily as yuppies build three-story glass-and-steel lofts.

This anthology also conjures up fictional landmarks straight out of our collective unconsciousness. When Emory Holmes II describes the Château Rouge, a ten-story black marble curvilinear structure on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard built by L.A. architect Paul Williams that “looked like a fat stack of bop records ready to be played,” we think, Oh yeah, that place. If it doesn’t exist, it should.