I FELL IN LOVE with Bombay the instant I touched down at Chatrapati Shivaji airport. Thousands of miles from home, this maddening, seductive city felt instantly familiar, the outsize sister city to my native Los Angeles: the same sun-washed street scenes, the same striving newcomers, the same pervasive unreality.

Like L.A., Bombay is a city in constant upheaval, a city of self-invention. Bombay is a land of possibilities, which despite its five centuries of accumulated ruin feels forever young and untried. It is a created city, dreamed up by the thousands who see it reflected on their television screens, who write fan letters to stars as distant and otherworldly as minor gods. Suketu Mehta famously referred to Bombay as the “maximum city” in his book of the same name—I would refer to Bombay as an “imaginary city,” a cultural construct as much as a piece of land.

To call Bombay, home to Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, an imaginary city may seem flippant in light of the city’s very real concerns. But sadly, it is often those with the least resources who are drawn to Bombay’s mythic aura. The poorest come in search of food and housing; those only slightly better off, in search of fame. With its combination of high hopes and bitter failures, it’s no surprise that Bombay would be an ideal setting for Vikram Chandra’s latest best-seller, “Sacred Games,” Bombay’s own brand of literary noir.

At nearly 1,000 pages, “Sacred Games” is an encyclopedia of pulp fiction, a deft mixture of cops, criminals and vamps. Part “Citizen Kane,” part “Sunset Boulevard,” part “The Godfather,” “Sacred Games” nonetheless owes its greatest debts to the smoky fiction of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and William P. McGivern (as well as fellow Bombay pulp writers Clive James, Gregory David Roberts, Leslie Forbes, and H.R.F. Keating).

The heart of this sprawling story begins when, after living abroad for years, conducting clandestine business via satellite phone, crime lord Ganesh Gaitonde appears suddenly in an apparently impregnable concrete cube in the middle of Bombay. Gaitonde begins to tell police inspector Sartaj Singh (who also appeared in Chandra’s short story collection “Love and Longing in Bombay”) the story of his life, narrating through a speaker to the detective outside. Sartaj alone hears the true story of Gaitonde’s rise from a small-time hood to an international mafia don. But before Gaitonde can finish his tale, the police batter down the cube with a bulldozer, Gaitonde is found dead inside with a mysterious female companion, and the legendary gangster continues to narrate his coming-of-age story from beyond the grave.

Running parallel to these posthumous musings are Sartaj’s own investigations into Gaitonde’s life and death at the behest of the Research and Analysis Wing of India’s Central Bureau of Investigation. In a contemporary twist on noir plotting, Chandra dramatizes the connections between street-level gang warfare and international terrorism, and the dead Gaitonde is suspected of having held information about terrorist attacks in Bombay.

The story is anchored by a vast assortment of pulp standbys, including colorful criminal cohorts Kanti Bai and Paritosh Shah; Shambhu Shetty, the unctuous owner of the Delite Dance Bar; mafia rival Suleiman Isa; calculating Juliet “Jojo” Mascarenas, talent scout and part-time madame; the icy femme fatale Zoya; and glad-handling Parulkar, the deputy police commissioner and a master of spin.

But the story hangs between the two main characters, Sartaj and Gaitonde, and in classic noir style it’s not clear who, if anyone, is the hero. Singh spends most of his time strong-arming unruly teenagers and breaking up domestic squabbles with his cynical constable, Katekar. He is lonely, isolated from his coworkers by his religion (he’s the city’s only Sikh inspector) and by his heartfelt if wavering commitment to honesty. A policeman’s son, Sartaj’s ambitions have been worn down by the daily grind of gang warfare. He is not above beating and torturing suspects, sustained by Parulkar’s lukewarm conviction that “We are good men who must be bad to keep the worst men in control. Without us, there would be nothing left, there would only be a jungle.”

Gaitonde, meanwhile, is a noir lover’s protagonist, more deceived than deceitful, his base impulses covered by justifications, excuses, and high-minded plans. The higher he ascends, the more he is plagued by anxiety, paranoia, and helplessness. His many insecurites are channeled into ongoing sexual neuroses, including a vicious addiction to prostitutes. Like the film world he invests in, he is larger than life but utterly flat: “The Gaitonde they had read about in police reports and in the newspapers dallied with bejeweled starlets, bankrolled politicians and bought and sold them—his daily skim from Bombay’s various criminal dhandas was said to be greater than annual corporate incomes, and his name was used to frighten the recalcitrant.” He is rumored to live “on the Indonesian coast in a gilded yacht.”

Chandra is interested in self-improvement, in the will to overcome accidents of birth and make yourself anew in a new city. Gaitonde is hopelessly dedicated to self-improvement, whether giving up alcohol, teaching himself English from action movies, or trying—in a caustically funny scene—to lengthen his penis through a series of Internet-prescribed exercises. His mistress, the beautiful film star Zoya, takes superficial improvements to the level of ascetic rigor. Of plastic surgery, Chandra writes, “She has a little chart of the body and she’s got it all marked on that. With prices next to each part. And she knows exactly which doctor, what the procedures are … She’s an expert. She has it all in a file marked ‘Body.’”

But despite their best efforts, Chandra’s pulp players are locked into their set roles, as rigidly conventional as a Bollywood romance. Moreover, cinema spectacle is everywhere in the lives of Chandra’s characters. Singh and Katekar pass the time with reminiscences about film star Dev Anand. Mob bosses and street thugs watch Bollywood to learn their lines, to create their personas. Gaitonde and his henchmen gather daily in his yacht headquarters to watch Indian movies: “We watched Vardarajan’s life in complete silence, from his beginnings in the slums and his rise up to power and fame. When his son was killed … we felt that pain, it was ours. We had also lost our loved ones. I had tears on my cheeks. All of us did.”

As his mistress explains, “He played the part of Ganesh Gaitonde even when he was alone with himself.”

Gaitonde’s rival, Muslim gang leader Suleiman Isa, watches the “Godfather” series again and again: “he wanted to understand what had happened to him, what he had become.”

As for Sartaj, “He knew now that he wasn’t going to be the hero of any film, even the film of his own life.”

Like Hollywood, Bombay’s Film City has been labeled a dream factory. In fact, it is a 500-acre patchwork of mock-up palaces, homes, and villages that serve as backdrops for many Bollywood movies. In “Sacred Games,” Chandra describes an evening trip to this artificial paradise: “There were the clustering shadows under the leaves, the flashing jigsaw of branches, and then suddenly in the clear there was a looming castle, high-turreted and fluttering with flags in the coming moonlight. It was made of wood and canvas, but in this light it was absolutely real. We went past an entire Goan town square, capped by a high church holding up its crucifix, and also a fishing dock with boats asleep against each other in a leaning row.”

For noir buffs, postwar Hollywood’s reputation as a dream factory was precisely what made it an ideal backdrop for profound disappointment and isolation. Los Angeles was poised at the edge of the country and the end of the road. Both cities are coastal outposts, the place for desperate last stands. The noir dreamscapes of Los Angeles and Bombay are carried aloft by dreams of success and second chances; weighted by corruption, venality, isolation, and despair.

And yet, despite the city’s similarities, “Sacred Games” is finally a story about a very particular city, and it succeeds best when Chandra finds a voice that is distinctly his own. A restaurant in Kailashpada, Gaitonde’s dusty beginnings in Gopalmath, a “wasteland of weeds and bushes”; assignations in Juhu and Santa Cruz; Bandra as a “sprinkling of bright blue and orange” across the sea; Bangladeshis with false papers in Navnagar; “that particular Bombay stink in the thick air, of petrol fumes and pollution and swamp water.”

In a tender moment, Sartaj reminisces about “playing cricket on a Dadar street, the fast pok of the tennis ball and the faces of his friends, and the feeling that he could hold the whole city in his heart, from Colaba to Bandra … Had it really existed, that small empty street, clean for the children’s cricket games and dabba-ispies and tikkar-billa, or had he stolen it from some grainy black-and-white footage?”

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Summer Block Kumar is a freelance writer and critic currently living in Shanghai.