By Jordan Vega · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, May 2012
In late May 2012, FishbowlLA tracked an Orange County Register write-up of Miles Corwin’s new novel Midnight Alley — the second in his Ash Levine detective series. Corwin, a former longtime LA Times crime reporter who had become a university professor, was building a second career as a crime-fiction novelist drawing on his decades of LAPD-beat experience.
Then
Miles Corwin had been one of the LA Times’s most-cited crime reporters across the 1990s. His non-fiction books — The Killing Season (1997) and And Still We Rise (2000) — had been substantial works of immersive long-form reporting.
The Ash Levine series — featuring an LAPD homicide detective — was structurally a natural extension of his reporting career: decades of real LAPD-beat knowledge channeled into procedural detective fiction.
Now
Miles Corwin has continued the Ash Levine crime-fiction series. The broader category — LA-set crime fiction grounded in genuine LAPD knowledge — runs from Joseph Wambaugh through Michael Connelly and writers like Corwin.
The 2012 piece reads now as a small documented moment of the LA-crime-reporter-to-novelist trajectory.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.