Los Angeles literature’s historically marginal place in the American canon can partly be attributed to the prominence of “popular” literatures in its cultural production. This chapter addresses the literary tradition with which LA is perhaps most frequently associated, especially in the popular imagination: crime fiction, in the lineage established by Raymond Chandler. Norman observes how, in Chandler’s genre-defining writings, Los Angeles is charted as a topography of absent, empty, alienated spaces – establishing enduringly powerful visions of the city. Norman then turns to Ross Macdonald’s debts to and departures from Chandler, the complex nostalgia for a midcentury city built upon White supremacy that animates James Ellroy’s police procedurals, and Walter Mosley’s transformative reconfiguration of the iconic lone private eye as an African American.