L.A. is her city of mystery

In Denise Hamilton’s Los Angeles, there are no Hollywood power moms, no uncensored celebrities, no one from any kind of top 100 list. Hamilton’s Los Angeles is one of those places that’s hidden in plain sight, a roiling stew of recent immigrants, skeletons dancing on the Day of the Dead, resourceful heroin traffickers, abandoned children and, ultimately, moments of grace.

Hamilton’s Los Angeles is virtually a recurring character in her three mystery novels, including the newest, “Last Lullaby” (Scribner), which penetrates the shadowy world of international trafficking in children. Indeed, the city is second only to Hamilton’s protagonist and alter ego, Eve Diamond, a tough-but-vulnerable Los Angeles Times reporter endowed with super-sized nosiness topped with a generous dollop of moxie and heart.

L.A. may be a world capital, but Hamilton takes her readers to a place most of them have never seen.

In many of the best mystery novels, where it was “dun” is as important as whodunit. And already critics and readers are comparing her to mystery writers whose depiction of place, time and tone remains as indelible as any in contemporary fiction. In its review of “Last Lullaby,” for example, The Times said, “comparisons with Raymond Chandler aren’t too far out of line.”

Hamilton, 44, is thrilled to be keeping such rarefied company.

“I read Chandler and also Ross Macdonald, not because I wanted to write like middle-aged white guys in 1950s L.A., because that’s not my L.A.,” she says. “My L.A. is a very multicultural place where fourth-generation Angelenos butt up against people who’ve just come off a boat from somewhere. This is very grandiose of me, I realize, but I wanted to update Chandler’s tone and his noir feel for L.A. to a millennial, multicultural L.A. from a female perspective.”

Hamilton, a married mother of two boys, is sitting on the second-floor deck of her Spanish-style Glendale home. On the street below, palm trees sway lazily in the afternoon breeze blowing down from a nearby arroyo. Her sunny suburban neighborhood is as pristine as Diamond’s world is gritty, but she knows both well.

Like Diamond, Hamilton was a reporter for The Times, primarily covering the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys from 1985 to 1995. As an education reporter, she covered a lot of crime involving kids. And if her novels’ depictions of youth at exotic risk are persuasive, it’s because she’s seen the real thing close up.

“Last Lullaby” was inspired by an award-winning story she wrote for the now-defunct New Times newspaper about a 2-year-old Thai boy who landed at LAX after being sold into the international baby trade. In her first book, “The Jasmine Trade,” she delves into the world of “parachute kids,” rich Asian teens who are stowed unsupervised in California by parents who remain in Asia. In last year’s “Sugar Skull,” named after Day of the Dead confections, she gets caught up with a teen runaway. Along the way, she becomes intrigued with the son of a Mexican music-promotion titan as well as the phenomenon of the narco-corrido Mexican ballads lionizing drug lords.

“I want to tell stories that ... really do exist here in L.A.,” she says. “They go on under our noses. And as a reporter, I had entree to all that. Being a news reporter is almost as good as being a cop, because you have a notepad and a press pass and you knock on doors and often people let you in.

“And they bring you pictures of their dead child or their murdered spouse and they cry and tell you this incredible story about how they came from Vietnam or spent five years in Pol Pot’s killing fields. And you sit there and you’re overwhelmed by it all.”

Hamilton’s words spill out rapidly. She’s a slender woman in a loose-fitting black shirt and pants, but she’s a formidable presence. Her physical slightness pales against her intensity and evident passion for her work.

And yet, Hamilton never set out to be a novelist. The eldest daughter of a Russian-French immigrant nurse and an Irish American roofing contractor from a pious Catholic family, Hamilton grew up in North Hollywood speaking French as well as English. She studied economics at Loyola Marymount University, but after a year working for a metals trading company, she realized she wasn’t cut out for a business career. A boyfriend studying journalism inspired her to do the same at Cal State Northridge. Her first job was an internship at The Times. She stayed for 10 years.

Hamilton’s initial career plan was to become a foreign correspondent based in Moscow. Two traveling fellowships, including a Fulbright, took her to Hungary and the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian war in the early ‘90s. But she decided against a career abroad when she fell in love with David Garza, an L.A. native and her husband now of 10 years.

Her move into mystery writing was pure serendipity. A neighbor in Silver Lake, where she was living by the mid-’90s, invited her to join a fiction writers’ group. Hamilton agreed. And then realized she needed to come up with some fiction.

“Was I really working on something? No. But I’m a journalist. I set myself a deadline and I sat down and banged out the first chapter of ‘The Jasmine Trade.’ I had written a story for the L.A. Times about these parachute kids, and these kids haunted me. I always wondered what happened to them. And as a novelist, you can play the game, what if?”

In creating Eve Diamond, Hamilton played the game with her own life. What if she hadn’t met her husband and had remained the intensely career-driven single woman she’d once been?

“I call her my wilder alter ego,” she says. “She’s a flawed person. She’s vulnerable. She’s not as tough as she thinks. She’s very ambitious and when she gets thwarted by people, that just makes her fight harder. She has to be an attack dog to get the story. That’s what I was, and that’s what Eve is.”

With her third book, Hamilton appears to be hitting her stride. Calling her “one of the brightest new talents to enter crime fiction over the last few years,” the Chicago Sun-Times recently praised “Last Lullaby” for confirming “that promise with a gripping, action-packed work that ought to bring her books to a much wider audience.”

“This book is making a big step forward for her in terms of public recognition,” says Hamilton’s editor, Susanne Kirk, whose stable of writers has included Patricia Cornwell. “She got a lot of nominations for awards [Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Willa] early on. Now there’s momentum.”

Hamilton’s hard-boiled heroine has earned her fans among men as well as women. Men such as Lee Helie, who approached her at a recent signing at the Mystery Bookstore in Westwood.

“What I do is pass [the books] around to the ladies in the family, and if they get nines or 10s, then I read them,” he told Hamilton. “Yours have gotten 10s so far.”

As Helie presented his book for Hamilton to sign, a convivial group of mystery authors mingled with its public. Their cheeriness is typical, according to Hamilton.

“The mystery community is very supportive,” she says. “We’re very congenial. I think it’s because we’re slashing and burning and dismembering people on the page, so we get our aggressions out.

“I also think there’s so much interesting writing going on in the mystery genre. I use it as a place to talk about class, race, culture, immigration, corruption. And where else can you do that but the mystery novel?”