COLUMN ONE : Gumshoes Discover Orange Co. : Dozens of books, especially mysteries, have been set there in recent years. Authors say the region is complex, vibrant and, unlike Los Angeles, not played-out material.

When Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe was plying the mean streets of Los Angeles in the ‘30s and ‘40s, Orange County had about as much of an identity as a John Doe laid out on a marble slab.

All Orange County had to offer to a story line were vast tracts of orange groves and bean fields, small town main streets and a few seaside resorts. Disneyland was a 185-acre citrus grove and Knott’s really was a berry farm. Not exactly the stuff of blockbusters.

Indeed, bucolic Orange County was little more than a literary pit stop, a quaint interlude from the real action in L.A.

But what a difference a few decades and half a dozen freeways have made.

Today, the county that Time magazine has called a “high-energy, high-rolling, high-living megalopolis” has come of age as a literary setting.

Judith Krantz, who set her glitzy 1990 bestseller “Dazzle” in Orange County, has called it “the hottest new part of California to watch--economically boiling and authentically exciting.”

Over the last decade, Orange County has served as the setting for more than 60 novels ranging in genre from mystery to science fiction to romance to fantasy.

“Orange County is a much more complex, diverse, multicultural, multiethnic society and it isn’t L.A. County’s little brother any more. It has its own persona,” said Kevin Moore, central library manager of the Anaheim city library system and a scholar of the contemporary mystery.

“The ‘80s,” said Orange County mystery writer Evan Maxwell, “really was the era when Orange County came of age both in its own mind and in the minds of others around the U.S. And fiction, frankly, helps establish that.”

Using settings from the high-rolling glitz of Newport Beach to the barrios of Santa Ana, and from the high-tech industries of Irvine to exotic Little Saigon in Westminster, novelists are debunking the stereotype of Orange County as a conservative, bland maze of suburban tract houses and shopping malls.

“I didn’t know there was so much money and power until I lived down here,” said Joseph Wambaugh, who called Newport Beach home for 13 years before writing “The Golden Orange,” his caustic 1990 novel that skewers the city’s moneyed elite who buy slabs of abalone “like it was lunch meat, at $40 per pound.”

After two decades of probing the underbelly of Los Angeles society, Wambaugh had no desire to return to his familiar literary turf.

“L.A. is nothing more than the Bronx with palm trees,” snapped Wambaugh. “There’s nothing there anymore but lawlessness and violence and garbage and trash and ugliness.”

Never one to mince words, the best-selling ex-cop maintains that “what used to be the California dream that was represented by L.A. is now moving south. I think that is something I instinctively realized and for that kind of story--the romantic mystery that sort of has the California dream interwoven through it--it had to be Orange County.”

Echoing Wambaugh, Moore contends that “L.A.’s tired. It’s deteriorated. It’s seen promises and dreams gone sour. Orange County is fresher territory. There is just so much you can read about Hollywood and downtown L.A. It’s just repeating itself. And there is enough in Orange County that hasn’t been tapped.”

No one is tapping it quite like Dean R. Koontz, the best-selling “Master of Menace” who has set 11 of his suspense thrillers in Orange County.

In his most recent No. 1 national bestseller, “Hideaway,” a demonic force slinks through the county at night looking for victims to add to his collection of bodies hidden beneath an abandoned amusement park east of San Juan Capistrano.

For Koontz, a Newport Beach resident, sunny Orange County provides the perfect setting for chilling tales.

“It’s always interesting to juxtapose beautiful weather and flowing bougainvillea and all the beauty of it against the darker side of the story line,” said Koontz, whose next novel, “Dragon Tears,” is set in Laguna Beach and Laguna Niguel.

“Orange County, for me, has some of the feeling I imagine that Chandler had for Los Angeles many years ago,” Koontz said. “It’s clear that while much of what he found was rough and corrupt he also found romantic, mysterious and fascinating. To that extent, I find Orange County that way now.”

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Until the 1980s, Orange County’s role as a literary setting was minimal at best. “An Annotated Bibliography of California Fiction 1664 to 1970” lists only 27 books set completely or partly in Orange County.

The county’s first appearance was in 1893 in “Yanko, the Musician and Other Stories” by Polish-born Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel Prize-winning author of “Quo Vadis.” Sienkiewicz, who had lived in Anaheim in 1876, set his story about rival grocers, “A Comedy of Errors,” in the German settlement.

In 1901 another famous author, Bret Harte, included an Orange County story, “A Widow of the Santa Ana Valley,” in his short story collection, “Under the Redwoods.”

Although “Young Man With a Horn,” Dorothy Baker’s highly regarded 1938 novel about a young jazz musician, is partly set in Balboa and James M. Cain’s 1941 “Mildred Pierce” includes a few scenes in Laguna Beach, most of the early books with county settings are largely forgettable.

Fittingly, six of the pre-1970 novels were mysteries. In “The Last Twist of the Knife,” a 1946 mystery by Marjorie Bonner, a guest is murdered during the private showing of a skiing film in a Laguna hideaway.

Orange County made several more appearances in mysteries during the ‘70s, including Elizabeth C. Ward’s 1973 murder tale “Laguna Contract,” in which she tapped the beach town’s hippie era.

But it was not until the early ‘80s that the trickle of Orange County mysteries turned into a flood. And just as Chandler defined Los Angeles in the ‘30s and ‘40s, mystery writers are in the forefront of literary Orange County.

One of the most prominent titles in the current wave is Kem Nunn’s critically acclaimed 1984 novel “Tapping the Source,” a gritty tale of violence and retribution set among the world of surfers and outcasts in Huntington Beach.

A year later, T. Jefferson Parker made his high-profile debut with “Laguna Heat,” in which a Laguna Beach homicide detective investigates the brutal murder of one of Laguna’s old-guard citizens. Parker has followed up with two more Orange County mysteries, “Little Saigon” and “Pacific Beat.”

Today, Orange County’s suburban mean streets are crawling with fictional gumshoes, including A. E. Maxwell’s sophisticated Fiddler and Fiora, who work out of a ‘30s beach cottage north of Laguna Beach; Robert Ray’s hard-boiled Newport Beach private eye Matt Murdock; Maxine O’Callaghan’s Santa Ana detective Delilah West; Jean Femling’s auto insurance claims investigator Moz Brandt, and the most recent arrival: Noreen Ayres’ Smokey Brandon, a crime-solving Orange County Sheriff’s Department forensic specialist.

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Despite its burgeoning popularity as a mystery setting, Orange County still trails far behind Los Angeles.

In his comprehensive bibliography “Crime Fiction, 1749 to 1980,” Allen J. Hubin lists more than 600 titles set in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Hubin, who is updating his book to 1990, said the Los Angeles area listing has grown to about 820 titles. Hubin, however, lumps Orange County with Los Angeles. But aware of the current spate of Orange County-set novels, he is considering a separate category for Orange County.

The sheer number of Los Angeles-set mysteries over the years merely underscores why locales such as Miami, New Orleans, Santa Fe and Orange County have become so popular in recent years.

What mystery readers in particular want is a sense of discovery. And although that is present in the works of writers such as Walter Mosley, who is looking at South-Central Los Angeles from the inside, and Cuban-American Alex Abella, who is writing about Los Angeles’ Eastside, there is a sense among many mystery fans that the Los Angeles lode has been heavily mined.

Doug Stumpf, executive editor of Villard Books, who has edited several Orange County-set mystery novels, calls the county the “perfect” setting for mysteries: It’s suburban, but with “the crime and sophistication of an urban center.”

“I think part of what has made Orange County a viable fictional landscape is that people want to read about something new. They don’t want to read about a place they know,” said Evan Maxwell, who, with his wife, Ann, writes the popular Fiddler mystery series, which debuted in 1985.

Maxwell said he has “always been irritated that Orange County was dismissed as nothing more than right-wingers, klansmen, John Birch Society members and a totally homogenous white-bread society. Anybody who has driven the length of Harbor Boulevard (which bisects the county) knows that isn’t true and it does the area a disservice to continue to perpetuate those stereotypes.”

In a sense, Maxwell said, he has felt “the urge to set the record straight or to bring a more complex picture of what this place is to readers all over. Orange County is more fun than it is given credit for. And it is far more dangerous, exotic and intriguing than the stereotype would have you believe.”

“You can find crime, violence, mayhem, greed, graft, corruption. That’s the grist for the crime writer’s mill.”

In the mid-’80s, mystery scholar Moore predicted an explosion of Orange County mysteries, but, she said, “it has surpassed even what I expected. There are so many more writers.”

“One thing I see different from novels set in L.A. County,” Moore said, “is that for the most part it’s white-collar crime here--it’s computer scams, it’s financial machinations, it’s fraud. . . . It’s endless. There is just so much that can be done.”

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At the time Moore was predicting a surge in Orange County mysteries, she felt that no single writer had yet staked out Orange County as his or her own as Chandler had done with Los Angeles in the ‘40s.

And now?

“I’d say probably Robert Ray came the closest,” said Moore, adding “we’ve lost that” if Ray moves his blue-collar gumshoe north to Seattle where the author moved in 1989. Although much of the action in his latest mystery, “Murdock Cracks Ice,” is set in Seattle, Ray said his private eye will remain in Orange County “because he knows the territory down there.” Besides, Ray wryly added, “I think there’s a lot more bad guys there than there are here.”

As for the Maxwells, Moore said that because they range so far afield with their Fiddler series--the action has taken them from Santa Fe to Napa to Seattle--”you don’t get the true sense of it necessarily being Orange County.”

Then there’s Parker, one of the county’s brightest literary lights. “Were he to write a continuing character, I think Orange County would be his,” Moore said. “But because he chooses to write different characters with each novel you lose that continuity.”

Moore concedes that “because he is mapping out different aspects of Orange County in his novels from Laguna Beach to Little Saigon, I think he’d be more identifiable as the chronicler of Orange County society. But I’d really love to see him go back and do a series character in the same way (Dashiell) Hammett and Chandler did.”

Parker bristles at the thought.

“If you’re going to equate the new Orange County voice with what Chandler did for Los Angeles, then it seems to me that’s a faulty proposition because what you’re asking for is a rehash--a smart first-person mean streets kind of narrative,” he said. “If you believe that’s what we need, Robert Ray would certainly be a good pick for that. But I don’t think that’s the way to go. That fiction was great and clear and vibrant 40 years ago, but times have changed and literature has changed.”

The Maxwells agree.

“The ‘Marlowe of one place’ idea is distinctly dated,” said Ann Maxwell. “I feel that if Marlowe were alive and working and kicking ass today, as it were, he’d have a much larger geographic scope because life has a much larger geographic scope.”

Their decision not to restrict Fiddler and Fiora to Orange County, she said, “is very deliberate in that sense. Orange County is not a claustrophobic little place and we didn’t want to do claustrophobic little books about it.”

Noting that the county is a focus of financial and cultural change, she observed that “we live in a very cosmopolitan and rapidly becoming very international community, and you can’t describe that by sticking only in Newport Beach or only in one of the other cities.”

“Therefore, we might live in Orange County, but you automatically are part of a larger world geographically. You pull a thread here and it can end anywhere. That’s part of the modern reality and that’s really part of Orange County’s fascination. Not every county’s like that.”

Novels Set in Orange County

More than 60 novels, including a few bestsellers, have been set in Orange County during the past decade. Here is a sampling:

“My place overlooks a slice of beach near the Newport Pier, an area known locally as Punker’s Strip. . . . It’s an interesting area, sort of a symbol for California. Everyone can drive. Everyone has a tan. No one can read. Most summers, I call the tow truck at least once on weekdays and five times on the weekend.”

--Robert J. Ray, “Dial M For Murdock”

“Mike Kilkullen’s money was all tied up in unsold land. If you kept an eye on Orange County land values, and she did, oh, she did indeed, then the Kilkullen Ranch was worth billions to investors who would stand in a long line to buy and develop virgin acres on that Platinum Coast.”

--Judith Krantz, “Dazzle”

“He pulled onto the shoulder. Open country lay ahead, hills dressed in crisp brown grass. If he went straight through the crossroads, he’d be heading into Laguna Canyon, where developers had not yet managed to raze the wilderness and erect more tract homes. Miles of brushland and scattered oaks flanked the canyon route all the way into Laguna Beach. The killer might have turned left or right.”

--Dean R. Koontz, “Hideway”

“Westminster, he thought, just forty miles south of L.A. and fifteen north of Laguna, but a world apart. A suburb straining for identity. . . . When the Indo-Chinese refugees arrived in the late ‘70s, Westminster got the identity it never had: it became capital of the largest population of Vietnamese outside of Southeast Asia.”

--T. Jefferson Parker, “Little Saigon”

“Most of the hot mommas were no younger than Cher and no older than Jane Fonda. Many could rival either when it came to body sculpting. It was astonishing what the Nautilus, the knife, and single-minded dedication had accomplished in The Golden Orange.”

--Joseph Wambaugh, “The Golden Orange”

“After Silicon Valley, Irvine Industrial Park had the second greatest concentration of high technology in the world. It wasn’t always that way. The park is as new as silicon chips. Fifteen years ago, Irvine contained only a handful of businesses scattered north and east of the John Wayne Airport. Today, there were 4,000 firms. I usually credit two factors for that ungodly growth--eucalyptus trees and tilt-up slabs.”

--A.E. Maxwell, “Just Another Day in Paradise”