If you're looking for sparse depictions of lost men wandering through their own spiritual crises with Los Angeles as the backdrop, then I've got a couple of books for you. Bret Easton Ellis' Less than Zero and Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man are starkly set apart by their eras and styles, but the basic premise, and the use of L.A. as setting and symbol for psychological desperation and emptiness, makes them far more similar than would appear at first glance.

A Single Man gives us one day in the life of George, a middle-aged British university professor living in Santa Monica who has recently lost his partner, Jim. The book, published in 1964, provides an incredibly well-rendered inner life, one tortured by grief and the burden of a gay protagonist who longs for acceptance, but also retribution. Told in a clipped, incredibly intimate present-tense third person, George's vanity and ego are laid bare, and the inner dialogue rings absolutely true. It's a book about aging and mourning, loneliness and the tragic futility of human connection. What I'm not sure it's about is Los Angeles.

If you can get off the freeways, and learn to navigate Los Angeles via surface streets, then you'll start to understand this city. Veteran Angelinos tell newcomers this, the assumption being that understanding Los Angeles leads to liking it.

Both Bob Jones from Chester Himes' 1945 novel If He Hollers Let Him Go and Antonia Bernal from Hector Tobar's 1998 novel The Tattooed Soldier navigate the city via surface streets and do so deftly. Bob does because most freeways didn't yet exist when Himes wrote If He Hollers. Antonio does because he's homeless and carless in and around downtown and Westlake. But neither protagonist from these two novels, facing off in Round Three of our Best L.A. Novel tournament, likes Los Angeles anymore for it.

Both men come to the city hoping for a new start. Instead they find themselves in a confusing place full of frustrating injustice that they can't escape, even as they veer from one neighborhood to another.

The noir finals! There are few things L.A. does better than stylishly dark crime stories full of desperate characters in bleak settings. We invented film noir, even if it took a French critic to provide its name. And before that were the books that inspired the movies -- the tautly written paperbacks featuring bad dames and the violent men who lusted for them. True, L.A. can't lay claim to the man who first perfected the hardboiled detective, Dashiell Hammett, but the writers he inspired, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, surpassed the master. And they were both L.A. writers through and through.

Which is why, to this reader, the final matchup in our Noir category is a bit of a disappointment. How can we be seeking the best noir L.A. novel ever without Raymond Chandler in the running?

The battle between Carolyn See's Golden Days and Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man pits Topanga Canyon against Santa Monica, science fiction against realism and feminism against gay rights.

In crisp, gripping prose, Isherwood chronicles a day in the life of George, a gay professor trying to move on after the death of his long-time partner, Jim. Published seven years before Stonewall, the book's repudiation of gay stereotypes was nothing short of revolutionary.

See's novel, set in a dystopian version of the 1980's, stars Edith Langley, or Edie, who escaped two bad marriages, pulled herself up the socioeconomic ladder and sneers at "helpless" wives who are unable "to be anything more than ornaments ever." Yet Edie only manages to achieve her dream job -- president of the Third Women's Bank of Santa Monica -- because the man she's sleeping with offers it to her. And once she's got the position? "I learned to say nothing in meetings, letting my earrings speak for me."

The category in this bracket of our Great L.A. Novel challenge is "Hollywood novel." And that category is practically defined by these second-round contenders, What Makes Sammy Run? and Day of the Locust.

While Day of the Locust is set in Hollywood, and does comment on the horrors and absurdities of showbiz -- especially in its final, terrifying scene -- it's really not about Hollywood. It's about the "great mass of inland Americans," as the back-cover copy of my edition calls them, who went West in search of the good life. Author Nathanael West touches on Hollywood, but these people are his true subject.

What Makes Sammy Run?, on the other hand, is the ur Hollywood novel. Author Budd Schulberg's keen observations of the studio business came at first-hand: He was the son of motion picture executive B.P. Schulberg and he grew up in and around the industry. The titular Sammy Glick rises from lowly New York City newspaper copy boy to midlevel Hollywood studio exec by schmoozing and backstabbing, stealing ideas and passing them off as his own, and setting the template for showbiz climbers to this day.

Writing about Charles Bukowski's Post Office in the first round of this tournament, I noted that pitting it against John Fante's Ask the Dust was somewhat unfair when taking into account that Bukowski's novel was heavily influenced by Fante's. (Bukowski even penned a foreword to Ask the Dust, writing at one point that "Fante was my god.") The same would appear to be true of Less Than Zero: though there isn't as direct a correlation, Bret Easton Ellis did go on to use the opening paragraph of Fante's seminal novel as the epigraph to his short story collection The Informers some ten years later. It thus comes as little surprise that his precocious debut has a good deal in common with Fante's bittersweet masterwork.

Double Indemnity, by James M. Cain, and L.A. Confidential, by James Ellroy, both concern themselves with conspiracies. And both were turned into movies that arguably surpass the books -- no small feat, that. But that's where the similarities end.

In fact, these books could hardly be more different and still both fall under the category of noir.

Ezekiel "Easy" Porterhouse Rawlins and Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch traipse across the Los Angeles landscape, both surrounded by rotten cops who target them for murders they didn't do and a system so out of whack it's a miracle Los Angeles doesn't implode. Separated by a generation in time, Rawlins, a seething black man mired in the post-War racism that makes him ever-wary to leave Watts, is just the sort of fundamentally decent lawbreaker that white cop Bosch would seek out to learn the truth.

Walter Mosley, in his bestselling 1990 novel Devil in a Blue Dress, gives us Easy Rawlins as an object lesson in the racial divide circa 1948. Easy is a man of violence and promiscuity who continually befriends black murderers, whores and low-lifes -- but puts himself in greater danger by responding to questions from a white girl on Santa Monica Pier.

Easy is no detective, just an aerospace worker fired from a construction team that built airplane wings. But he accepts money to search for the stunning Daphne Monet, even though he knows that if he finds Daphne he'll almost certainly put the blue-clad beauty in terrible danger.

Easy, turned into a killer by World War II and haunted by "the voice," is on a parallel mission to hit back at bigots, as he does when a white front-office man doesn't believe that Easy has an appointment with a man-about-town who is seeking Daphne.

I shook my head at him. I would have liked to rip the skin from his face like I'd done once to another white boy. ... I was disgusted. "Forget it man," I said. "You just tell him, when you see him, that Mr. Rawlins was here. You tell him that the next time he better give me a note because you cain't be lettin' no street niggahs comin' in yo' place wit' no notes!"

As Easy is drawn into an underworld of child sex slavery, incest and greed, he never loses that racial anger -- but now he's got lives to save, and reluctantly takes on as a partner his old friend Mouse, a murderer and psycho.

Pitting Kate Braverman's Lithium for Medea against Héctor Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier is, in many ways, a battle of Los Angeles's west versus its east, no matter that the crumbling 1970s Venice of Braverman's book bears little resemblance to what we now know as the Westside and the action of Tobar's novel technically takes place on the occidental side of the L.A. River.

Lithium for Medea is the story of Rose, a 27-year-old with a dismissive, ambitious mother and a gambling addict father who's laid up in the hospital with cancer. The family moved across the country to Los Angeles after his first bout, when Rose was only six, and this time he's looking even worse. She copes by shooting up coke and having sex intermittently with her standoffish boy-space-friend Jason.