Noir, for the postmodernist

How not to come off as a second-rate Raymond Chandler is a problem that afflicts every contemporary writer of hard-boiled fiction. Peter Moore Smith solves it by copping to it -- "Los Angeles," his second novel (after "Raveling"), can be described as a postmodern mystery of the highest order and, at the same time, an unabashed homage to the noir genre.

The voice we hear in "Los Angeles" belongs to Angel, an aspiring but so-far-failed screenwriter. He wakes up early one morning with his "usual fusion of coffee and psychopharmaceuticals." He contemplates the "blue minutes on the blue digital clock of the coffeemaker." As he gazes out his apartment window, he is struck by the "unfamiliar six-in-the-morning brilliance" of the light. Smith concedes the cinematic quality of the scene: "In the quiet rustle of overhanging branches," observes Angel, "I even thought I heard a director whisper, 'Action!' "

At that moment the telephone rings, the voice of a mysterious woman named Angela is heard, a single word is spoken -- "Angel" -- and thus begins the tale of Angel's desperate effort to rescue the woman who is rescuing him from a life of abject loneliness. When she goes missing, he must rescue her from something or someone far more dangerous. Or so we are led to believe.

Angel is an albino ("even my eyelashes are white, and what isn't white is stark pink"), Angela is black with eyes "a shade of blue I didn't know eyes came in"; they both live in the City of the Angels. She makes her living lap dancing at a "strip mall strip club"; he lives off his father's largesse while working on a screenplay titled "Los Angeles." After their first casual encounter in the apartment house where they both live, Angel finds himself obsessed -- and perhaps in love -- with Angela.

"It was because her eyes kept changing colors," explains Angel. "It was because her breasts were fake. It was because she came home at half past three in the morning but acted like it was three in the afternoon.... It was because she was a liar and so was I."

As if to acknowledge his admiration for the masters of noir, Smith salts his story with little moments of tribute -- "Blade Runner," for example, runs endlessly on Angel's DVD player as a "kind of low-level light source." And, just as the play of light is a characteristic conceit in film noir, light is the book's leitmotif: "I have become obsessed over the years with the poetry of Los Angeles light," says Angel, for whom light can literally be life-threatening. "[H]ow it ignites the fires that periodically burn entire sections of our city to their asphalt foundations."