San Diego, lolling in the sunshine down there on California’s southern Pacific coast. Just under a million and half people, it’s America’s eighth most populous city. Formerly part of the Mexican Empire, boasting a “Mediterranean climate,” and the second largest city of California after LA. A lot of beaches, Balboa Park, a world-famous zoo, a baseball team, and some of the US’s most expensive homes and resorts. Of course, there’s some crime writing too…and some strong pedigree—Raymond Chandler did pitch up in La Jolla for a time…
Let’s start with San Diego’s entry into the always excellent Akashic Noir short story series – San Diego Noir (2019) — which, as the book’s blurb says, highlights a few things not actively promoted by the visitors bureau — a number of America’s most corrupt politicians, border-related crimes, terrorists and the occasional earthquake. The volume is edited by Maryelizabeth Hart, a co-owner of Mysterious Galaxy, an independent mystery and science fiction bookstore in San Diego, founded in 1993. Some great short stories by local writers and those who have long written about the California coast, including Don Winslow (whose Cartel Trilogy hops in and out of San Diego and along the the San Diego-Tijuana border region frequently), as well as T. Jefferson Parker, Luis Alberto Urrea, Gar Anthony Haywood, Gabriel R. Barillas, Maria Lima, Debra Ginsberg, Diane Clark & Astrid Bear, Ken Kuhlken, Lisa Brackmann, Cameron Pierce Hughes, Morgan Hunt, Jeffrey J. Mariotte, Martha C. Lawrence, and Taffy Cannon. A great place to start exploring San Diego’s sunny, but dark, underbelly.
Louisa Luna’s bounty hunter Alice Vega series starts with Two Girls Down (2020), but it’s book two in the series, The Janes (2020) that moves to the outskirts of San Diego where the bodies of two young women are discovered with no names, no IDs, and nobody looking for them. Fearing a human trafficking ring, the police and FBI ask Alice Vega to find out who the Janes were and find the other missing women. Vega returns in the conclusion of the trilogy, Hideout (2022), which takes the bounty hunting hero to the Pacific northwest.
Elizabeth Breck’s Madison Kelly series is all about San Diego. Kelly, a San Diego private investigator, first appears in Anonymous (2020). Madison Kelly arrives home to find a note stabbed to her front door: STOP INVESTIGATING ME, OR I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND KILL YOU. The only problem? Madison hasn’t been investigating anyone. But there are girls going missing from the clubs in San Diego’s famed Gaslamp Quarter and Madison has been reading about the case on the internet. Now it’s her case. In Double Take (2021) it’s a cool and crisp fall with bright blue skies in ‘America’s Finest City.’ But a young journalist has been missing for a week, and her boyfriend hires Madison Kelly to find her. A third Madison Kelly is hopefully coming down the publishing pipeline soon.
Prolific author William Barrons had written thirteen books in the San Diego Police Homicide Detail series. The series starts with The .22 Caliber Homicides (2015). Across the series various detectives in the homicide department take the lead in different books.
A few more San Diego set crime novels…
- Don Pendleton’s San Diego Siege (2014) sees Vietnam Vet Mack Bolan out to take down the San Diego syndicate. San Diego harbor is becoming a major transit point for Mexican cartel drugs so Bolan recruits the two surviving members of his long-disbanded Death Squad from Vietnam to take on the mob. Siege is the 14th book in Pendleto’s Executioner series which can apparently be read in any order.
- San Diego born and bred author Larry St John recreates 1990s San Diego in Killing Me in San Diego: Not a Bad Place to Die (2014). Bizarre situations and a cast of quirky characters.
- Richard Opper’s The Body in the Barrel (2022) is set in 1973 San Diego with a Harbor cop mixed up with an X-rated movie producer, the local San Diego Chinese Tong organised crime gang and from San Diego’s conservative (and possibly corrupt) establishment.
- T. Jefferson Parker features in San Diego Noir above. His novel The Fallen (2006) begins with a dead body under a San Diego bridge. The ensuing investigation reveals all manner of local sins – the city’s pension crisis, various political scandals, and some notorious local murders.
- Cruz Nicholas Medina’s Tjuana Dust (2011) follows a man who becomes embroiled in Ramirez cartel, criss-crosses the Tijuana border, Barrio Logan and the deserts of East County and eventually a San Diego that represents the end of the line and America.
And finally, something special and a little different as ever. This time a great book that somehow missed a lot of people’s radars – former newspaper journalist and San Diego resident Curtis Ippolito’s Burying the Newspaperman (2022). It’s a hell of set up — Marcus Kemp is a beat cop living a normal life in San Diego until the day he makes a shocking discovery: a dead body in the trunk of a stolen car. Worse, the victim turns out to be the man who abused him as a child. So he has a dilemma – he thinks maybe the killer get away with murder but he’s a cop. And when he investigates the crime there’s a big problem – any more would be spoiler (and there are a lot of twists in this novel). It’s sunshine noir, but internally dark while the sun keeps on blazing over San Diego.
