Talking Mystery With the Master of O.C. Noir

Writer T. Jefferson Parker suggests that an interview take place in San Clemente, at a restaurant on the pier with a view of surfers who are riding the waves with the languid grace of dolphins. This Orange County beach community, which conjures up images of former President Nixon running his metal detector over the sand, is the perfect spot to talk about Parker’s recently published book--his ninth--a soulful police procedural titled “Red Light” (Hyperion).

After all, Orange County, where Parker lived for 41 of his 46 years, is a vivid character in all his novels. Indeed, although it may sound like an oxymoron, Parker is the leading practitioner of what might be called Orange County noir, an ongoing exploration of the dark side of life in a part of Southern California routinely identified with unrelenting suburban blandness. The closely observed detail that gives his stories credibility is drawn from his experiences growing up there and watching, with considerable rue, its transformation over the last four decades.

“Red Light,” which quickly found a place on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, is Parker’s second book to feature protagonist Merci Rayborn. Introduced in last year’s “The Blue Hour,” Merci is a gifted Orange County homicide detective with more troubles than Job. In the new book, she is trying to raise her toddler son alone and to maintain her equilibrium after her lover and fellow officer is accused of killing a beautiful young prostitute--a hooker with a place on the water in San Clemente.

“Red Light” is more low-key than “The Blue Hour,” less violent and less tragic than the earlier book that dealt with Rayborn’s professional and personal involvement with Tim Hess, a fellow officer old enough to be her father who is undergoing treatment for lung cancer.

Rayborn’s father is a retired cop and a former member of the John Birch Society, the right-wing organization that epitomizes Orange County in the minds of many. Parker’s view of the society is both more intimate and more complex than most people’s, as is his view of the county as a whole. As he explains, without embarrassment, his much-loved dad--Robert Parker--was a leading John Bircher during the 1960s and ‘70s. When young Jeff (the T. in his name doesn’t stand for anything) was growing up in suburban Tustin, local law officers regularly parked their Harley-Davidsons on his lawn when they met with his aerospace-engineer father and other Birchers to talk about what is now termed “community policing.”

These meetings weren’t sinister, says Parker, who remembers no racist talk but does recall the screening of films documenting atrocities committed by the Soviets. Political talk at dinner was as much a part of his daily life as going to the beach, hunting for snakes with his pals and planning family camping trips.

“Doesn’t everybody have a meeting of the John Birch Society in their house on the third Thursday of every month?” he asks, with a laugh.

More Soulful Than Most Thrillers

Parker recently moved to rural Fallbrook in northern San Diego County with his second wife, Rita, his 8-year-old stepson, Tyler Rice, and his and Rita’s son, Tommy, almost 2. Parker is tall and lean, with a handsome face that has seen a lifetime of sun and more suffering than most successful men his age.

Parker’s book is far more moving than thrillers have to be. And no wonder. When Parker writes about the heart-wrenching courage of people like Janine Zamorra--the wife of Merci Rayborn’s current partner--who continues to try to look pretty as cancer steals more and more of her humanity, he writes from experience. In 1992 he lost his wife of three years--a popular local rock singer named Cat Parker--after a two-year battle with brain cancer. Cat (Catherine Anne) was just 34.

“Many of the passages in ‘Red Light’ are an echo of that time,” says Parker, whose mother died of brain cancer only three months before Cat was diagnosed. While Cat was still alive, he began working on a book based on her illness--1993’s “Summer of Fear.” That novel was his first narrated in the first person and its crime-writer protagonist lived in a house on stilts in Laguna Canyon much like the one Parker shared with Cat and later with Rita, a paralegal whom he married in 1997.

Parker dispels the conventional wisdom that writing about a loved one’s death somehow transforms it into something less awful. “I don’t know anything cathartic or redemptive about writing about a death like that,” he says. “It didn’t make me feel better. But I knew I had to write about it.”

Parker, who graduated from UC Irvine with a degree in English, worked for several years as a movie critic, general-assignment reporter and technical editor in Orange County before his first book--”Laguna Heat”--was published in 1985. For three years, he also wrote a weekly column for the Orange County edition of The Times, called “Parker’s Place.”

A critical and popular success, “Laguna Heat” was made into an HBO movie starring Harry Hamlin and Jason Robards.

“I wrote a novel before ‘Laguna Heat,’ which is still in the drawer, where it belongs,” Parker says, describing it as “a Bildungsroman about a surfer.”

Like most people who can use Bildungsroman in a sentence, Parker is a passionate reader. “I fell in love with reading before I could read,” he recalls. As a boy, he’d sit on his mother’s lap while she read and reread such favorites as “Bambi” and “Vulcan the Condor.”

His was a nice “uneventful childhood,” Parker recalls, much of it spent outdoors, where he learned to relish hiking, camping, fishing and, of course, surfing. And the Parker house was full of books, a treasure a child could explore on his own as surely as he could wander the local hills and tide pools. After Jeff outgrew “Vulcan the Condor,” he devoured the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Rudyard Kipling and Jack London, among others.

“My mom and dad were great enemies of television,” he says. “I don’t think my peers were reading Poe when they were 12 years old. I think they were watching ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ so I got the jump on them.”

From writers like London, Parker learned the importance of narrative momentum. “I do like a big, powerful, irresistible engine at the heart of the narrative,” he says. And although he likes “the lushness of good writing,” he continues to admire “that big, bright, charged storytelling that you need to hold the attention of a 12-year-old boy.”

Poe also gave future generations of practitioners the courage to explore the ugliest human impulses. You can see the legacy of Poe in some of Parker’s more macabre novels, notably 1998’s “Where Serpents Lie,” about a snake-obsessed pedophile.

Parker Doesn’t Want to Be Influenced by Peers

He continues to read widely today--mainstream fiction such as that of Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane and Richard Ford. He highly recommends Jonathan Lethem’s recent suspense-filled novel, “Motherless Brooklyn.” He reads nonfiction on everything from prisons to California’s willingness to steal her neighbors’ water. He tends not to read too much of the work of his mystery-writing peers “because I don’t want to be too influenced by their voices and concerns.”

Parker’s seems to be a nonromantic love of nature, one that’s closer to Teddy Roosevelt’s than to the stereotypical tree-hugger’s. He keeps a dozen snakes at home, including nine king snakes, and loves going into the desert to collect the uncuddly creatures. He likes to hunt, especially quail and chucker, an imported game bird that looks like a quail on steroids.

Parker finds that the solitary life of a writer suits him. “I am slightly antisocial,” he contends. “I would much rather be doing this than making calls during the day, trying to interest people in buying things.” He sets challenges for himself as a writer, like trying to make Merci Rayborn a “woman who didn’t sound like she was written by a man.” If writing is “a lonely go,” as he says, it is also one that can be interrupted. “You can always come out of your cave and look around in the sunlight and do what everybody else does.”

Given his history, aching loss will always be one of Parker’s themes, one that gives his novels a resonance that transcends genre. But he is also a man who has found love again. “Where Serpents Lie” is dedicated to Rita, “on this new morning.” And there are the boys--Tyler and Tommy. Optimism is mandatory for parents, however they have suffered, and to have a child of one’s own, that may be the very definition of hope. That buoyant emotion, too, has found its way into Parker’s latest book.

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Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at socalliving@latimes.com.