Epilogue to a writer's noir life - The publishing world left Mercedes Lambert for dead. Her work gets a second chance.

Munson wrote a trilogy of novels in the '90s, the first of which was the celebrated "Dogtown," set largely on the hard streets of Pico-Union.

Despite the name, she wasn't a man.

And despite her exotic-sounding pen name -- Mercedes Lambert -- she was a white Southerner who'd had a hard-knocks childhood.

Despite the author bio on the "Dogtown" book jacket, she didn't live in Montebello and didn't have two kids.

And despite her early success that included rave reviews and anchoring a sizable magazine article on L.A.'s then-nascent noir revival, she never quite arrived as a writer.

In fact, after some early success, she spiraled downward when the conclusion to her trilogy was rejected by her publisher. Health problems, severe depression, a stint of homelessness in Santa Monica, an escape to Prague and death by cancer in 2003 followed.

Now, the novel that served as the beginning of the end, "Ghosttown," is being published by Five Star, a small press in Waterville, Maine, next week, thanks to the efforts of literary friends and supporters.

Her advocates describe her as a potentially major figure, ahead of her time for her hard-bitten female protagonists and her portrayal of multicultural L.A. in love and squalor. Jonathan Kellerman calls the book "one of the most evocative L.A. crime novels ever written," and such writers as Hubert Selby Jr., Kate Braverman and Carolyn See championed her early work.

The first two books in the trilogy, long out of print, will be reissued next spring by Stark House, with an introduction by acclaimed Galway, Ireland, detective writer Ken Bruen.

It's hard not to read the tale of her life as that of a gifted artist, a literary martyr, destroyed by a heartless publishing establishment. But like a Raymond Chandler plot, it's not really that simple.

"She wrote mystery novels," said Michael Connelly, who never knew Munson but called her first novel, "El Niño," and the bruised idealism of its protagonist, a major influence on his work. "But she was probably the biggest mystery of all."

Munson, who came to L.A. after a difficult, itinerant childhood in the South, attended UCLA law school and worked as a court-appointed lawyer representing troubled families. By the early '80s, she got serious about writing.