A man walks into a Korean karaoke bar
and …
It sounds like the beginning of a
joke but it’s not, and by the time the first chapter of Mark Rogers’ outstanding
Koreatown Blues concludes with a
bang, you’ll realize it’s just the opening riff of a mystery that revitalizes
the L.A. noir tradition from the inside out. Readers who know Los Angeles will
be delighted by the specificity of the local color. (I lived in Koreatown when
I first moved to L.A., and Rogers nails it.)
The story is tight, the prose is
taut, and the pacing is cinematic as Rogers unspools his plot, a fantastic
thing involving blood feuds and murdered husbands and what the proprietor of the
bar refers to (with grim understatement) as “bad business.”
All that would be pleasure enough,
but Rogers also knows how to flesh out a character so that everyone from his
Latino employees to a flirtatious gypsy cab driver have their moments to shine
on the page. Rogers’ L.A. is people with hard-working immigrants who give the
lie to stereotypes, racist cops who couldn’t care less how people see them,
wannabe actors, and cranky old guys like Jules, Wes’ former boss, who used to
tell him that you can outsource a lot of things in America but you still have
to go local to get a haircut, your sink fixed, or your car washed.
