Pynchon deviates from his literary fiction base as he tries his hand at some L.A. noir with a twist of wackiness and a good stoner sensibility.  Harkening back to earlier works like The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice delves into the cosmos of an aging hippie detective whose brain plays like a psychedelic iPod on shuffle whle the case he’s working on grows stranger and stranger.  If you like Inherent Vice, try some of these titles:

God Is A Bullet - Boston Teran
Featuring a Mansonesque cult, kidnapping, murder and meth in L.A. County’s high desert, Teran’s debut is a noir masterpiece balancing the conflicting ethics of a jaded detective whose solving of a kidnapping is dependent on an emotionally damaged junkie in search of redemption.

2666 - Roberto Bolano
One of 2008’s most critically acclaimed novels, Bolano’s final work is a labyrinthine detective narrative which on one level is about a particularly nasty spate of serial killings in Mexico.  On several other levels it is simulataneously a philosophical exploration of death and violence.

Vurt - Jeff Noon
Maybe not a readalike in terms of genre, but Vurt is most definitely a spiritual cousin to Pynchon.  Drugs, paranoia and conspiracy theories abound in this science-fiction novel where reality and fantasy merge into the literary equivalent of an Escher print.

The Invisibles - Grant Morrison
The Invisibles is a graphic novel featuring time travel, literary figures and political revolutionaries.  Morrison describes the first volume of his epic as ““a comic about everything: action, philosophy, paranoia, sex, magic, biography, travel, drugs, religion, UFO’s.”  The Invisibles is a Watchmen for post-punks with a penchant for Romantic poetry and a chaos magick sensibility.

The Dead Circus - John Kaye
Kaye’s delivers an L.A. noir set in the late 60’s & early 70’s.  Detective Gene Burk’s fiancee is murdered and the trail leads to a Manson groupie with ties to Bobby Fuller, the early 60’s pop star whose mysterious death remains unsolved.  But Fuller’s death by misadventure hints of a conspiracy that may or may not involve the Sinatra clan.

The Grifters - Jim Thompson
Thompson’s tour-de-force essay in unmitigated nihilism tells the story of three grifters - a mother, her son, and his girlfriend, and their inevitable crossings, double-crossings and outcomes as career con-men/women.  A wicked and delicious read.  Thompson never disappoints.

The Burnt Orange Heresy - Charles Willeford
The art and crime worlds mesh in this noir about an ambitious, yet shady, down-on-his-luck art curator who will stop at nothing, including murder, to acquire the works of a famous French painter who has relocated to the Florida everglades.  Willeford’s narrative delivers equal parts noir thriller and clever satire of art critics and criticism.

The Gum Thief - Douglas Coupland
An epistolary friendship is formed by two disgruntled Staples employees - Roger, a middle-aged soon-to-be-divorced failed insurance agent who is working on a novel influenced by Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and Bethany, a twenty-something goth who still lives at home and is horrifried by the mediocrity of her life and job.  Bethany finds Roger’s journal and begins writing to him in it, establishing an epistolary structure that all the characters begin to take part in, to include the characters in Roge’rs novel.  The Gum Thief is a wild metafictive ride.

Dreamland - Newton Thornburg
Thornburg is noir fiction’s best-kept secret.  In Dreamland, a drifter named Crow picks up a female hitchhiker named Reno and the two transients become caught up in a suicide that’s beginning to look suspicious.  Pulled more deeply into a web of porn, sleaze, and brutal sex murders, Crow and Reno discover that Hollywood’s seamy underbelly reveals its fair share of of rich and powerful players.