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Raised in South Central, Joe Ide Expands the Territory of L.A. Noir

He jumped between worlds, never completely at home in any of them, but it taught him how to decipher people and how to meld in.Credit...Brad Torchia for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — The crime writer Joe Ide sat in a car at the corner of San Pedro and Adams in South Central Los Angeles and memories of his boyhood returned — mostly in the form of characters. “The winos used to sit out there on orange crates and drink Thunderbird all day,” he said, pointing at the graffiti streaked storefront of what is now a pupuseria. There was one “wino,” tall, immaculate and dapper in a homburg hat “with a little feather in it,” who used to escort Mr. Ide’s mother onto the bus everyday, like a butler.

This desolate collection of liquor stores, auto shops and taco places offers up a lot of ghosts for Mr. Ide. Stories poured out and he began sounding like the narrator of an Elmore Leonard novel.

“There was a pool hall right up here,” Mr. Ide said. “Sam’s pool hall. And my older brother Jack he shot pool but it was too scary for me. It was one of those places where everyone is on parole and the hookers show you their bullet wounds. Yeah, there was a hooker out here who would actually show you her bullet wound.”

The compact 60-year-old with a trim, salt-and-pepper goatee and sleek silver glasses, staring out from behind the wheel of a gray VW station wagon, seems an unlikely maven of these corners and their seedy histories, of their hustlers and drunks, of the territories of various warring gangs. But this is where Mr. Ide (pronounced EE-day) came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, in the years following the Watts riots, in a neighborhood overwhelmingly black and poor. His grandparents, who had bought a rickety wood-frame house here during the Depression, were themselves too poor to leave once all the other Japanese families moved away.

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Growing up, Mr. Ide lived in two worlds: At home, his stern grandfather collected samurai swords and spoke no English; outside he had mostly black friends. He was never completely at ease in either place, but the experience taught him how to decipher people and how to blend in. He didn’t even blink when I asked whether he hesitated to write books about almost exclusively black characters. “Never occurred to me,” he said.

“I wanted to be black, but I knew I wasn’t,” Mr. Ide said. “I always felt something of an outsider. I wasn’t black. I wasn’t white. I was way far from being Japanese. So I was a lot on the fringe. And I was a watcher. I would listen to people. Listen to the way they talk and imagine what was going on in their heads.”

This outsider sensibility combined with a deep knowledge of those South Central streets helped Mr. Ide many decades later when he sat down to write his first novel, about a cerebral private investigator who solves crimes in a community just like the one where he grew up.

That first book, “IQ,” was published in 2016, praised and given awards not just for its Leonard-like fun with dialogue and character, but also because he was placing a Los Angeles crime story in a part of the city usually ignored by the genre. In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin called Mr. Ide “the best thing to happen to mystery writing in a long time.” His growing fan base includes the retired professional basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the dean of Los Angeles crime writing Michael Connelly, who told me that he found Mr. Ide “completely refreshing,” a writer who “takes it up a notch,” because “he’s reflecting on how difficult this place can be to grow up in and survive when you live south of the 10 Freeway.” The third entry in the series, “Wrecked,” comes out Oct. 9.

Mr. Ide was in his mid-50s when he decided to draw on that rough world of his youth and meld it with his childhood obsession with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. About Sherlock, Mr. Ide said: “I identified with him. He’s a loner. What was most powerful was that just by virtue of his intelligence, he could face this world and not be afraid.” While Mr. Ide’s brother coped with his surroundings by joining a local gang, the Outlaws, and becoming a drug dealer, Mr. Ide himself looked to quiet, watchful Sherlock as his hero.

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“I wanted to be black, but I knew I wasn’t,” Mr. Ide said. “I always felt something of an outsider. I wasn’t black. I wasn’t white. I was way far from being Japanese.”Credit...Brad Torchia for The New York Times

The detective he created, Isaiah Quintabe, the IQ of the books, has incredible powers of deductive reasoning and hyper awareness, much like Sherlock. “He could scan a room, a city block, or a crowd of faces the way a peregrine could fly over a vast, brushy landscape and find that silhouette, that twitch, that shadow, that gleam of an eye, and spot the tiny ground squirrel that was the same color as the rocks it was hiding between,” Mr. Ide writes. Isaiah lives in East Long Beach (birthplace of Snoop Dogg and demographically similar to the South Central of Mr. Ide’s youth). He is a fastidious, aloof man who keeps spotless the polished cement floors of his house and always wears the same uniform: light blue button-down shirt, jeans and Timberland boots.

After the death of his older brother in a hit-and-run accident (or was it?), Isaiah begins solving small local crimes — tracking down runaway children, confronting high school bullies, retrieving burgled heirlooms like old Miss Myra’s brooch — and accepting payment in the form of “a sweet potato pie or cleaning his yard or one brand new radial tire.” He soon acquires his very own Watson, Juanell Dodson, a bumbling former gangbanger and con man who is the funny to Isaiah’s heavy. As the books progress the stakes become more dangerous and the two are taken into worlds beyond the chain-link fences and dried-out lawns of the neighborhood. There are Chinese gangs and malicious pit bull breeders, scheming hip-hop producers and, in his new book, a group of corrupt former soldiers with a history of torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib.

In addition to Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Ide imagines Isaiah to be like Steve McQueen in “Bullitt” or Sidney Poitier in “The Heat of the Night”: cool and competent. It’s not coincidental that his references are from films. Mr. Ide’s most recent career — there were a few — was as a screenwriter. After college he got a master’s degree in education with the intention of becoming a teacher but soon discovered, after one semester, that children annoyed him (“They were so fussy, always asking me questions”). He then spent years working odd jobs before beginning to write films. After what he says were “a dozen lousy screenplays,” he finally sold one to Disney and started working. But none of his films, all fairly formulaic he says now, ever came close to being greenlighted. In his early 50s he woke up one day and felt physically repulsed from turning on the screenwriting software. “There was so much failure associated with it,” Mr. Ide said.

He fell into a depression that lasted a couple of years and only lifted when he began working on the IQ series, which he found liberating, as if he was finally telling stories that felt authentic to him and his life.

It took three years to write the first book, but with no connections in the publishing world he wasn’t sure how to sell it. Mr. Ide did have one critical contact though, a first cousin he barely knew: Francis Fukuyama, the political scientist and author of several books, including “The End of History and the Last Man.” Mr. Ide remembered him mostly as a little boy who came to visit South Central decades ago wearing short pants and suspenders (“Oh yeah, he was fresh meat”). He had little hope his intellectual cousin would connect with a crime novel. But, in an email to me, Mr. Fukuyama wrote that once he received the book, he “couldn’t put it down.” Mr. Fukuyama’s agent read the manuscript in a weekend and committed right away to representing Mr. Ide, selling the television rights before the book was even in print.

Back in the old neighborhood where Mr. Ide said most of the friends he grew up with ended up either dead or in jail, the streets were empty underneath the everyday blue of an Angeleno sky. He doesn’t visit here so much any more. Mr. Ide lives in Santa Monica now. But the talk and the curious situations from long ago aren’t far from his mind. As he tells it, they almost predestined him to tell these stories: “You meet people like that you almost have to write a book.”

Follow Gal Beckerman on Twitter: @galbeckerman.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Rough Youth Became a Smooth Writer. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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