By Mria L. La Ganga
FROM: L.A. Times

Steph Cha doesn’t expect much in the way of good crime fiction to spring from the coronavirus outbreak. She has lots of reasons, not least of which is that the pandemic has put a damper on crime from Los Angeles and New York City.

No crime? No crime stories.

But wait until the outbreak is over, says the author of the 2019 crime thriller “Your House Will Pay” and a trilogy of L.A.-based detective novels featuring Korean American sleuth Juniper Song.

“If we come out of this, and this is an unmitigated economic crisis, and we have an unprecedented closure of small businesses, more homeless, 25% to 30% unemployment,  the postcoronavirous era could be like the Depression era,” Cha said. “That’s where noir comes from.”

Here in the undisputed capital of noir, a new generation of fictional gumshoe is treading the mean streets of a very different Southern California than the one first explored by the likes of Philip Marlowe. Many are like Cha’s Juniper Song and Joe Ide’s Isaiah Quintabe, millennial sleuths whose work brings them into parts of Los Angeles County rarely explored in one of fiction’s most popular genres. Read Rest of Article Here.