by JULIET WATERS

From what I remember of my dad's Ross Macdonald paperbacks, the world of divorced detective Lew Archer was usually populated by wayward nurses, desperate hookers and ambitious matriarchs with great legs. So when I learned that Christopher Rice was a big admirer of Archer, I had to ask, "It must be lonely being a gay Ross Macdonald fan?"

"Yeah," drawls Rice, an obvious native of New Orleans, "it is, you know. I have one other gay friend who's also a writer, Sean Morgan Wilson, and he's a Ross Macdonald fan. He's actually the one who recommended him. But I think it's probably just the two of us [laughs]. I mean, even if my gay friends are reading crime fiction I'm lucky. Most of them don't." More likely they're reading his mother's notoriously homoerotic vampire books. But after two bestselling novels and a third one on its way up the list, Christopher Rice has earned the right not to be asked why there aren't any vampires in his L.A. noir thriller Light Before Day.

As it turns out, this novel is more influenced by his father, poet and painter, Stan Rice. Much of Light Before Day revolves around the relationship between Adam Murphy, a young gay alcoholic journalist, and James Wilton, a crusty, famous L.A. noir writer. "The inspiration for James Wilton is my father, who passed away before I wrote the book," says Rice. "He's my father in crime writer's clothing." Still, Rice's first two novels A Density of Souls and The Snow Garden had enough goth in them that the shift to realistic thriller is noteworthy.

On what brought about the transition, Rice says, "I knew that I wanted to write a first-person detective thriller and I wanted to effect that kind of voice about the gay community in West Hollywood. You know, I read a lot of fairy tale versions of gay life in the modern day ghetto, and I didn't want to write another one. But I also wanted to tell a thriller that broadened beyond the ghetto... I wanted my gay detective to have a platonic relationship with a straight man. And eventually, Adam got to go outside the ghetto and go into the central valley and solve the mystery, and he has to leave his comfort zone."

That's something Rice seems to have managed himself. I would have pictured him feeling a little awkward at Bouchercon, the annual reunion of macho mystery men like Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin. But it turns out Rice had a great time at Bouchercon 2004, held last year in Toronto. "Oh it's fun," he says. "You can talk about stuff at Bouchercon that would get you on a watch list if you talked about it anywhere else. It's cool. It's a great comfort to step out of the solitary writer's chair and find yourself with like-minded people. Because you really can convince yourself when you're in the middle of a project that you're the only one who's ever felt that way - who's ever felt that detached from reality. I loved it." And it looks like he's planning on at least a few more.

"I think I'm going to stay with thrillers, because thriller is broad enough," Rice continues. "There's a lot of room within the thriller label. But I don't know if I'm going to stick to noir..." His hesitation is no surprise given signs that Rice isn't entirely comfy with the lingo. From Light Before Day it's clear he can plot a compelling, interesting, socially relevant page-turner. Then you come across a line like, "Linda saw Jimmy standing next to me and her polite smile dropped from her face like a married father's pants in a rural rest stop." But if Rice can just get his gay detective to start palling around with some more hardboiled editors, as well as writers, he should be able to hang on to at least some of the new noir wardrobe.

Light Before Day by Christopher Rice, Miramax, hc, 325pp, $32.95