Authors walk shadowy alleys around the City of Angels

THE idea of noir is almost numbingly familiar these days, yet elastic too, and seemingly inexhaustible. “Los Angeles Noir” is the latest in a series of books of original, city-themed stories that New York-based Akashic Books has published in recent years. It appears in the wake of “Baltimore Noir,” “Brooklyn Noir,” “Dublin Noir” and a host of others that include “Twin Cities Noir” and “Wall Street Noir.”

Wall Street noir? Shouldn’t we Angelenos, residents of the sprawling, thriving, endlessly varied city that gave birth to noir, feel somehow insulted by being invited so late to this particular party? Well, no. Akashic is making an argument about the universality of noir; it’s sort of flattering, really, and “Los Angeles Noir,” arriving at last, is a kaleidoscopic collection filled with the ethos of noir pioneers Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain but “filtered through a multicultural lens,” says editor and contributor Denise Hamilton, a former L.A. Times reporter turned crime novelist.

Viewed together, these 17 very different stories confirm just how many places L.A. has become. In “Mulholland Dive,” Michael Connelly writes of the view high up on Mulholland Drive, the city’s dizzy backbone: “It could make you feel like the prince of a city where the laws of nature and physics didn’t apply.” Naomi Hirahira places her excellent story of female obsession, “Number 19,” in a massage parlor in Koreatown. Any parent who’s ever screamed on the touchline at a Westside kids’ soccer game will relate to “Kinship,” Brian Ascalon Roley’s tale of street pride and family vengeance in Mar Vista. Robert Ferrigno walks knowingly through Long Beach in “The Hour When the Ship Comes In.” L.A. Times columnist Patt Morrison’s narrator pokes into Beverly Hills jewel heists using “the best intelligence network in town ... the cleaning ladies” in “Morocco Junction 90210.”

In “What You See,” Diana Wagman brings alive the tidy oddness of Westchester in a single excellent sentence: “Small square homes lined up on either side like kindergarteners on their first day of school.”

And in a wildly funny gambling story that reads like the beginning of a novel, Neal Pollack captures his locale with equal brevity and wit: “City of Commerce may be the most ironically named place in America, which is saying a lot.”

Janet Fitch, as usual, operates at a scary level of intensity. Her story, “The Method,” opens with a string of zippy one-liners that out-Chandler Chandler. “It was cold in Los Angeles. Fifty-eight, sixty degrees. In Nebraska, I’d have been scraping ice off the windshield while the wind bit my face like a Rottweiler, but in L.A., when you have to put a sweater on, that’s winter.” “When he left, the place went flat, like old soda pop.” “He posed, lifting his drink as if it were the skull in ‘Hamlet.’ ” Her wit leads to a cruel tale of a smart waitress, the older man who seduces her and the has-been 1970s actress they plot against. “And so I joined the ranks of the oddly housed. Los Angeles is full of us -- house sitters, subletters, permanent house guests,” the narrator says after moving in with the sad, aging actress. The Los Feliz setting is evoked without fuss as the story builds to a mind-bobbling climax, like her novel “White Oleander,” at full throttle; I wanted to take my eyes off the page and couldn’t.

“The Method,” like Hamilton’s “Midnight in Silicon Valley,” does indeed recall the type of plot that Cain made seem particular to Southern California, where money gets mixed up with sex and murder in a landscape that is constantly changing in an amoral universe.

Other stories strike a very different tone. “Fish” by Lienna Silver tells how a friend’s death causes an elderly Russian emigre to twist and turn his own history “like a Rubik’s cube.” Silver names her protagonist Ivan Denisovich, a reference to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s legendary character, except the gulag where this exile endures his day of epiphany is in the Fairfax district. “The leaning palms looked like bottle brushes against the dark red glow of the evening sky.... Cars zoomed by, up and down Fountain Avenue. An older woman with a grocery bag struggled with her keys. A black teenager coasted on his bike, hands off the bar, just like Grigory used to, back in Moscow. A Latina beauty pulled her screaming son out of a beat-up Toyota.” It’s lovely writing, the kind of quivering, spot-on observation of surface that can be the city’s gift to those who come to live here from far away.

“Fish” is haunting in the way of Christopher Isherwood, noir without being a crime story. The same might be said of Susan Straight’s “The Golden Gopher,” whose female narrator returns to L.A. to tell one childhood friend about the death of another. A Southern California native, Straight writes with penetrating insight, spinning worlds and characters into a vista of enormous sadness where past meets present: “That night, we walked like we lived in the Serengeti, I realized all those years later when I watched Grady disappear down 8th into the darkness. Like pilgrims on the Roman roads of France. Like old men in England. Like Indians through rain forests, steady on the trail. Fools craving movement and no words and just the land, where we left our footprints, if nothing else.”

“Once More, Lazarus” by L.A. Times foreign correspondent Hector Tobar is harrowing and completely convincing, a deep-dive into the tragedy of East L.A. gun culture. That story will stay with me; likewise those by Silver, Fitch, Hamilton and Straight, writers who infuse an almost cozy, slippers-by-the-fire trope with a fresh sense of character, place and danger.

Noir lives, and will go on living, as this fine but uneven anthology proves, because it’s about emotion, not style. Noir, to borrow Fitch’s wonderful phrase, is about “the oddly housed.”

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Richard Rayner is the author of several books, most recently the novel “The Devil’s Wind.” He also contributes the monthly column “Paperback Writers” for latimes.com/books.