I had Jo’s voice in my head early; I knew I wanted to spend more time with her. I didn’t have a story for her yet, but her voice was definitely the first thing that grabbed me and made me think, I could spend a novel untangling this person. She didn’t spring into my head fully formed, but her snappy, snarky voice was always there, sort of parallel, narrating events in my head all day long. Maybe she was just waiting for her chance to find the right story to waltz into.

The Lady Upstairs is a modern take on the classic noir genre. Did any particular noir authors impact your writing? Do you have any favorite noir movies or novels? How is this book different from a traditional noir story?

If you’re writing about LA noir, there’s no escaping Raymond Chandler, and The Long Goodbye is one of my favorite books. Nobody packs as much pain per ounce as James M. Cain—he can do more with one hundred pages than most authors can in a trilogy. Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy B. Hughes, Jim Thompson. But the writer I return to over and over is always Megan Abbott, particularly her novel Queenpin. Sara Gran’s Dope. Vicki Hendricks is another favorite—I don’t think anyone spends enough time talking about what a fantastic book Miami Purity is. Whenever I feel like my writing needs better rhythm, I pick up Elmore Leonard (my particular favorite being Gold Coast, featuring one of Leonard’s many compelling leading ladies named Karen). For films: I watched Body Heat almost daily while writing The Lady Upstairs (frighteningly, that’s only the tiniest bit of an exaggeration). Gilda and Jackie Brown were movies I returned to again and again, and it doesn’t get much more hard-boiled dame than Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction. Devil in a Blue Dress—both the Walter Mosley book and the film starring Denzel Washington. Steph Cha’s Juniper Song books were great modern noirs I turned to repeatedly.

As for how this book is different from a traditional noir story—I wanted to take all the noir tropes that I love and shift the spotlight. I wanted to create a femme fatale who was the center of the story—and a literal femme fatale at that. What if women had weaponized the anxieties of classic noir to work for them, to take back a little money and power for themselves?

The city of Los Angeles feels so alive on the page—it is almost a character itself! What is your own personal experience with LA and why did you choose to set the novel there?