"Indie authors have to be a thousand times better than any cookie-cutter mystery novelist backed by the majors to be considered equal."

An interview with Thomas Trang

As one of the great mythic American cities, Los Angeles has inspired crime fiction since the genre began. But do these stories reveal the real city or only help it to hide its true face?

For Thomas Trang, the fictitiousness of Los Angeles was part of the intrigue. His debut novel, Dark Neon & Dirt, is a cat-and-mouse heist story set in the city of angels. Trang joins us to talk about his book, being an outsider, and why he’s done with LA.

Your debut novel, Dark Neon & Dirt, was published in March by Shotgun Honey Books. Tell me about your year since then! What’s it been like having your first novel out in the world?

It’s been exciting but also a real learning process with marketing, hustling to spread the word, jumping on podcasts and doing interviews to talk about the book. Novelists are all forced to wear many different hats now – including the “self-facilitating social media guru” one. It’s tricky if you’re someone with an ingrained repulsion to promoting yourself. I try to have some fun with it.

What kind of response have you gotten from your readers? Is there anything that’s surprised you?

It’s mostly positive with a few surprises either way. One reader loved the book, but she absolutely HATED the Monroe character on a visceral level, which made me really happy. Others didn’t think it was enough of a heist novel. I’m okay with that because I never thought I was writing one. Someone else said it was one of the best heist stories they’d ever read. Some people loved the ending, others not so much. A rug-pulling finale is always a risk.

What I’ve learned is that once the book is out there, it doesn’t entirely belong to you anymore. That’s the deal you make when you publish. Again, I’m totally cool with this. There should be more honest criticism in the crime fiction space anyway. Not to be nasty for the sake of it, but to really engage with the book in a smart way and challenge it sometimes. Proverbs 27:17. Yeah, I’m getting biblical.

That’s how you learn to defend your choices as a writer and sharpen your talent. It’s healthy and it’s needed. Indie authors have to be a thousand times better than any cookie-cutter mystery novelist backed by the majors to be considered equal. There is still that stigma about smaller presses, plus the lack of visibility, so you gotta grab the reader by the throat from the first page.

Who were your biggest influences while writing this book?

Elmore Leonard and Don Winslow are the obvious ones in terms of prose. The dialogue and the punchy sentences. On a more abstract level, I’m influenced by writers like William Gibson, Roberto Bolaño, and Steve Erickson (who graciously allowed me to use a line of his for the epigraph). It’s not so apparent on the page, more of an attitude thing, getting the reader to care about your personal obsessions. There are things in Dark Neon & Dirt that really have no business being in a crime novel. Those are the best parts in my opinion.

I’m a big fan of hip-hop. The 90s New York stuff like Wu-Tang. The wordplay and the storytelling. It’s as big an influence as any author. Cinema too. LA crime films like Deep Cover and Emily The Criminal. The ghost of Heat obviously looms large for this book. Los Angeles, cops and robbers, doomed love. John Woo’s The Killer as well. I’m obsessed with that film. Thematically, they’re very similar.

Tell me about the development of your characters, Shaun Nguyen and Thomas Monroe. Did you have a pretty good sense of who they were when you started writing this novel, or did they surprise you along the way? What is it about Monroe that makes him a good antagonist for a character like Nguyen?

Shaun Nguyen was someone I had a pretty good idea of from the start. His backstory is one I know through family history and the Vietnamese diaspora after the war. Monroe was harder because of the biographical details, which are very different to anything I have firsthand experience with. I figure out their quirks and personalities through the writing process and many drafts. Too many drafts.

I never thought about Monroe and Nguyen in terms of protagonist and antagonist, or maybe I saw them as both at once. I talked about the influence of Elmore Leonard earlier, but where I completely depart from him is that his criminals are usually incompetent goofs. Nguyen and Monroe are both highly capable. They’re very similar in a lot of ways. This is where the tension comes in, because it isn’t about a good guy versus a bad guy. They’re both pretty bad guys! Or DEEPLY flawed good guys.

Although this book is set in Los Angeles, you’ve traveled and lived in major cities all over the world. Have those experiences shaped how you view and write about LA? Do you find yourself more skeptical of the city’s mythos, or is there really something unique about it?

I’d certainly be on more familiar ground writing about Paris or London, but the problem there is I wouldn’t know where to start or where to stop. Having moved around so much as a kid, I also don’t feel like I truly have a hometown in that traditional sense. LA can be an outsider city. London and New York are the same. They attract people from everywhere. That’s the common denominator. There’s this claustrophobic loneliness in all big cities I’ve spent any time in. Maybe that’s just me.

So, I leaned into that outsider approach. A shark can swim but it can’t tell you much about the water. Even if sharks could talk. Looking at something from a certain distance can give you a clear view. This is how I convinced myself to write the book anyway. “Write what you know” is such a stupid maxim, and taken literally can lead to really boring self-absorbed fiction. Just know what you write.

I was also really intrigued by the fictitiousness of LA. Have you ever seen the documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself? It explores the idea of Los Angeles as rendered by film. That and City of Quartz by Mike Davis have a healthy level of skepticism about the place. I’m always fascinated by artifice and mythos. Dark Neon & Dirt has a real cinematic fairytale quality about it too. Where else could it be set?

Having said all that, I’m absolutely done with Los Angeles now. It’s out of my system. Plenty of other authors have got that covered. That’s their beat and they do it well. I’m not sure where the next book will be set though. I like to bounce around.

As a writer, you seem to have pretty broad interests. I’d love to hear more about why you chose to write a crime novel for your debut. What attracted you to the genre?

I’ve always read crime fiction, but I like to experiment with different things when writing. I have weird short stories about Bigfoot and things that are more literary, whatever that means, but I still need – and very much want – the scaffolding of plot for a novel. I like action and genre trappings. Having all that with stylish dynamic prose is my sweet spot. Maybe one day I’ll write a meandering book about an ageing English professor and his erectile dysfunction. I’ll lace it with references to Greek mythology and antediluvian gender politics. Who knows? I kinda doubt it.

How did your book find a home with Shotgun Honey press? What was the process like, from that initial query to publication?

I had published some stories with Shotgun Honey. There was one called Shared Frequency which seemed to get a really positive response. I also had a story in the Rock & A Hard Place collection around this time, the One Percent anthology. There was a bit of momentum.

Ron at Shotgun Honey read the first 30 pages of Dark Neon & Dirt and liked it, and once he’d read the whole thing he wanted to put it out. It was that simple. I’d already been through the usual rigmarole with agents, the back and forth, the ghosting, them wanting to make it more like a Harry Bosch novel. Those books are cool, but that’s not what I do. Shotgun Honey liked the book for what it was. They’re not interested in chasing trends. The process was really straightforward. At least for me. I probably drove Ron crazy with my neurotic line edits right up until the last minute.

What projects are you working on now that you’re most excited about?

I have a sci-fi trilogy coming. I’ve just sent the third book to the publisher. The Wire but set in space. It moves from street corners to the corridors of political power. James Ellroy’s American Tabloid and spy fiction are also an influence. Espionage and skullduggery on an interplanetary scale. A cyberpunk John le Carré. It’s dense and weird, with moments of romance and spectacular violence.

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Thomas Trang is an author currently based in the UK. He was born in London but has lived all over the map: Sydney, Paris, Singapore, New York, and Manchester. He is the author of the novel Dark Neon & Dirt, and his stories have appeared in FutureQuake, Rock & A Hard Place, Full House Literary, Punk Noir, and Shotgun Honey. For more, please visit thomastrang.com.