Home
About Us
Books By Era
Detective Profiles
Title
Author
Copyright
Character
Place Name
Topic
About US
The LA Crime Fiction Database is the work of a single librarian/indexer over many years. It began as a challenge to see if the indexing and abstracting of a whole genre in a single city could be done, inspired by the realization that Harry Bosch and Elvis Cole lived on the same street, Woodrow Wilson Drive, just above my own house in Studio City.
The focus of the database is how place fits into and influences stories in time, a place/time dynamic.
The complete database presented here covers more than three hundred Los Angeles detective novels arranged by “Era”—the time of the action, so that books about a year and books published contemporaneously in a year appear together. Separate indexes by Author, Title, and Copyright Year lead to full book records with full publishing information and extensive plot summaries, as do Character and Topic Indexes. A Place Name Index leads to the place in the plot summary where the place name occurs. The user can jump from one book to another through time, for example Griffith Park (great for shootouts) or Pacific Coast Highway.
Detective Profiles of detectives in LA Crime Fiction appear separately, limited to detectives in series. The Profiles are arranged in a standardized classification based on a line from Robert Crais about “the outer self and the inner self.”
New additions to the LA Crime Fiction Database and LA Crime Fiction Detective Profiles are added continuously. Suggestions and comments are welcome.
Barbara Booth
Studio City, 2023