Thomas Trang’s “Dark Neon & Dirt": A Gritty, Twisty Riff on L.A. Noir

This one is pretty fun.

Thomas Trang’s “Dark Neon & Dirt,” which is coming out later this month from Shotgun Honey, is gritty, twisty, and most of all, fun. When I first read it in draft form a few months ago, it made me realize that a lot of crime fiction coming out today is too serious for its own good. Trang’s book has its share of moral questioning, of course, but it’s also jammed full of highly entertaining set-pieces and snappy dialogue.

The plot, in quick brushstrokes: Shaun Nguyen is an Iraq war veteran who is very good at defusing and building bombs. He also enjoys a lucrative side hustle as a sophisticated thief. When the book’s opening job goes bad, he must deal with backstabbing criminals and a vicious L.A. cop who’s hot on his trail. You’ve read some variation of this before, but that’s not a bad thing—it’s like watching someone highly skilled riff on a beloved tune.

I asked Trang a few questions about his writing process, the best ways to capture L.A. in fiction, and his inspirations:

Q: You did a great job of making L.A. a character in the novel, down to evocative descriptions of the surrounding desert and various neighborhoods (and the tunnels beneath downtown, which I’ve never heard of, but seem amazing!). In addition to that, I loved the details and intricacy of the heists and action scenes. What kind of research did you do into L.A. and crime?

Thank you! I’m not a native of the city and have only visited a couple of times many years ago. I have family in California, but they’re mostly around the Bay Area. My approach was to embrace the outsider aspect. A shark can swim but it probably can’t tell you much about the water. Los Angeles is also one of those places that is hard to definitively pin down. London and Paris are similar. Ask five people what the city is like, and you’ll get six different answers.

In terms of the research, it was the usual stuff. Writing a heist, you almost have to approach the thing like you’re doing it for real. Once I figured out what the target was, the location, you just work it out methodically. What sort of tools do you need? How do you access this building? My browser search history is in shambles and I’m probably on a watch list. You can disappear down all sorts of rabbit holes online, and believe me I did, so the danger is that you end up vomiting information on the page at the expense of the story. A lot of the details, the history of the city and so on, I tried to keep it natural. But if a character casually mentions someone at the assistant DA’s office or the socioeconomic history of Silver Lake, the minutiae is real.

I started to write the book in 2020 and finished it in 2021, so like a lot of people my memory of that time is pretty fuzzy now, but I always wanted to write a “Los Angeles Book.” I think that was the title of the first draft in Word. Films probably pushed me toward it more than anything else. Stuff like “Deep Cover,” “To Live & Die in L.A.,” “Drive” and of course Michael Mann.

Q: Michael Mann’s “Heat” gets thrown around as the quintessential L.A. crime story—but it’s not the only one, of course. If someone’s interested in reading or watching more fictional crime set in the City of Angels, what do you recommend they seek out?

You cannot really get around “Heat” when it comes to L.A. and crime. If you want to play the trumpet, you need to reckon with Miles Davis. Anyone who reads my book will see a direct throughline to the film. It provided some of the early plot scaffolding. The opening armored truck heist (but with very different results), the cop vs robber thing, and the duality there. This last one is a story as old as time though. You see it in Greek mythology. It’s Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. John Woo’s “The Killer” was also a huge influence.

I mentioned a bunch of Los Angeles films earlier, but another one that has stuck with me over the last few years is “Emily The Criminal.” It really captured the weird mix of claustrophobia and loneliness unique to big cities like L.A. in my experience, and the desperation which is inherent to late-stage capitalism.

I’ll avoid naming the iconic noir authors of Los Angeles or even some of the newer ones writing great stuff over the last few years – Everybody Knows who they are. Richard Lange has written some spellbinding crime novels set in L.A. but “The Smack” in particular stands out. His most recent book, “Joe Hustle,” is a slow-burn work of quiet brilliance.

Dana Johnson is an amazing crime-adjacent writer, and her collection of stories “In The Not Quite Dark” was a big part of shaping how I’ve come to think about Los Angeles. It’s no coincidence that one of my characters lives in the Pacific Electric building downtown.

Rachel Howzell Hall’s series about Detective Elouise Norton is great. Procedural novels that deliver the thrills and spills of the genre, but also zig where others zag.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Steve Erickson. Not a crime novelist per se, but my favorite Los Angeles writer of all time. His version of L.A. is a surreal beast, an apocalyptic city of sandstorms and time slips. Shapeshifting and fantastical—maybe not so different from the real thing. He was gracious enough to let me use a line of his for the epigraph in “Dark Neon & Dirt”.

Q: Sometimes it’s great when you’re reading a crime story and run into an old trope—it’s like running into a pal you haven’t seen in some time. You have folks who buy thrillers and mysteries because they want that familiarity, those same patterns of character and plot. But at the same time, as writers, we also want to craft things that are innovative, unexpected. How do you balance the need to service the motifs and archetypes of genre while also driving into new territory?

That’s a great question and something I thought about a lot. I like the tropes and the patterns, and they exist for a good reason. They work! But yeah, it is about finding a balance between them and something fresh.

My approach was to do that through the characters. Nguyen felt like somebody we don’t really see in a crime novel. Not just Vietnamese, but mixed race. I know that “The Sympathizer” features a similar protagonist, but I still haven’t read it or seen the HBO series. That’s a historical novel that ties directly to the war, which was not what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write a genre book with racially diverse characters but have that part of it be almost incidental. I didn’t want to write an immigrant story, or a book about race. But… it did start to creep in through the revision process. That’s the thing about characters—they all have a history. They all come from somewhere, and it shapes who they are. Even if they think it doesn’t.

Like I said earlier, I definitely used “Heat” as a template for the book, but it was loose enough for the story to move in other directions. I didn’t want to write a Temu version of “Heat.” That’s a losing proposition. The characters are different, so they took it to different places. By the end of the book, we are a long way from a showdown by LAX!

Q: The thing I love about “Dark Neon & Dirt” is the pace—it’s incredibly fast, light on its feet, but doesn’t skimp on details when it needs to. What’s your approach to designing heists and action scenes?

Rewriting and then some more rewriting. I’d still be tinkering with the book if the publisher let me. I’m glad it comes across as fast-paced, because it didn’t feel that way to me at first. I guess it is, but there are also strange tangents with people eating dinner, talking about this or that. Music, the books they read, or maybe their careers, and that weird scene at the art gallery. Those are probably my favorite parts of the novel. They’re what make the story feel textured. I suppose this is the Elmore Leonard influence. What I try and do is make it feel realistic instead of an infodump. The way people talk and what they choose to talk about, and even how they say it – that’s character.

I don’t know if I have an approach or strategy to it beyond putting the work in. Action scenes are the hardest to write as well, because there’s usually not a lot of dialog. Too much wordsmithing and it can slow things down, but the danger is writing something that reads like stage directions. Thomas Harris is really good at writing action, though I don’t think he’s especially known for it. I’m thinking about the opening of “Hannibal” in particular.

Q: The book seems ripe for a sequel—what do you have coming next?

Next up is a science-fiction project that I’ve been working on for a long time. It’s a mix of WWII spy fiction and “The Wire” but in space. Cyberpunk but not overtly so. A dense political thriller with flying cars. My publisher liked the first book but wanted a trilogy. I wrote a one-page treatment for the second novel, they gave it the green light, and we were off to the races. That was the middle of 2021! I’m still trying to finish the third one. Real life keeps conspiring to stop me from writing, but I’m also very slow. Like you mentioned before, I don’t skimp on details in “Dark Neon & Dirt,” so you can probably imagine what that process is like when building a world from scratch.

With that in mind, I’m definitely suffering from sequel fatigue. When I finished “Dark Neon & Dirt,” I thought the story was really done, but the longer I’ve sat with it, maybe not. The ending is a little more ambiguous than it appears on the surface. So who knows? Everything I’ve written is all in a shared universe. The flash fiction, the stories in anthologies, even the sci-fi stuff. Minor characters pop up in different places, or there are continuity things, but it’s very subtle. It might just be for my benefit alone.

I have plans for a novel after the SF trilogy, but it’s only at the rough notes and daydreaming phase so far. A big, world-spanning, violent story. It’s different and ambitious in its scope. Beyond that, I genuinely have no idea. Not yet.