Parker’s new Old West is trailblazing

After 14 novels behind the Orange Curtain, T. Jefferson Parker has come north to do some business with a big iron on his hip. “L.A. Outlaws,” Parker’s first novel set in Los Angeles, is at once a noir thriller and a western ballad of desperadoes and doomed lovers. The book is both hard-boiled and heartbreaking, Ross Macdonald as sung by Marty Robbins.

Parker writes with an understanding of the West’s essential character: In “Outlaws,” he casts Los Angeles as an eternally sprawling, brawling camp town, populated by bandits and bigots, the quick and the dead, where the poor who once rendered tallow now work the deep fryer at KFC. And Anglos are just another hardy invader species.

Parker also manages something rare in the noir genre. He writes a powerful woman. Suzanne Jones, a mild-mannered L.A. Unified history teacher, moonlights as the populist outlaw Allison Murietta. She claims to be a direct descendant of the legendary bandit Joaquin Murietta, and she’s inherited her infamous ancestor’s “love of seduction and his contempt for the rich and powerful.” When we meet her, Allison’s already famous for targeting strip-mall fast-food joints, telling us: “They’re all just poverty vendors with a protection racket on the side.”

The novel gets underway when Allison stumbles into a diamond heist gone mucho malo. With a professional killer in pursuit, Allison absconds with the diamonds and the heart of a young sheriff’s deputy.

That would be Deputy Charlie Hood, who still walks on the sunny side of 30 but is already laden with the ghosts of the Iraqi town of Anbar: “Hood still woke up in the dark sometimes with the echoes of IEDs and gunfire in his ears and the taste of Iraqi dust in his mouth.” When Hood falls hard for Suzanne-Allison, one fears the young deputy may be in over his head, but Parker nimbly sidesteps those well-worn noir tropes. Hood isn’t merely one of James M. Cain’s tumescent dupes, and Allison is no mere Phyllis Dietrichson. Allison is neither a man-eating sexual profligate nor an old-school femme fatale. She is another creature entirely, fierce and fallible.

The killer stalking Allison is Lupercio Maygar, a Mara Salvatrucha gangster gone rogue, who speaks softly and carries a machete in a quick-draw scabbard. Lupercio disembowels, severs, cleaves and swiftly turns a barn confrontation with two Native Americans into “The Song of Roland.”

A lesser writer might be content to send a cardboard killing machine after his heroine. But Lupercio is no mere plot device. The splendor and horror of Parker’s villain is not the man’s abundant savagery but, believe it or not, his abiding humanity. We glimpse the crucible of Lupercio’s youth in war-torn El Salvador, the warm simplicity of his family life and his undying devotion to his plump wife, Consuelo: “Practically a stranger to him, she had cursed two assassins out of her kitchen one night while Lupercio hid in a cabinet with the pots and pans, and in a corner of Lupercio’s heart this had made him hers forever.” And in what may be the novel’s finest and quietest moment, we watch Lupercio’s twin stepdaughters carefully trim their murderous daddy’s hair in the living room of their humble Adelanto home: “It looks good, Dad. High and flat like you like it.”

Like Allison, Lupercio wears his anonymity like an old Indian blanket but secretly craves his own dime-novel apotheosis. Even he is not immune to L.A.’s false promise of celebrity. As he pursues his quarry, Lupercio wonders what it would be like to have his own show, “The Lupercio Maygar Show, or just ‘Lupercio.’ ”

Lupercio’s hunt for Allison gives the novel its forward momentum as well as two camera-ready action set-pieces. But this book has more going on than hot pursuit. Parker tinkers with race, the legacy of conquest and the vicissitudes of time: “On the walls were framed paintings of old California -- Spanish Missions, vaqueros, bull-baiting, horses. Hood watched the oddly muted play of paint lit by the electric candles of a chandelier.” Indeed, time in this book ripples like heat convection. “The past is now,” Allison’s mother tells Hood. “A sigh. A generation. A grave and a birthplace. It’s all one instant.”

Like the laconic lawmen who populate his fiction, Parker rides easy in the saddle. His concise prose, at once low-key and lyrical, plays almost like cowboy poetry. Although one still finds Parker’s books shelved in the mystery section, to dismiss novels like “L.A. Outlaws” or an earlier one, “California Girl,” as mere mysteries does them a disservice. In this book-a-year era in which most crime fiction feels hastily assembled from a kit, casting Parker as a mere mystery writer is a little like writing off Graham Greene’s work as espionage fiction.

Will Beall is the author of the novel “L.A. Rex.”