In 1990, Mike Davis published what he refers to as a “difficult, Marxist treatment” of Los Angeles called City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. The book, in which Davis redirected the conception of the city to its ongoing and bitter struggle between competing classes and interests, all but predicted the Los Angeles riots of 1992, which, when they erupted, catapulted Mike Davis to fame. What followed was the meteoric rise of Los Angeles’s sole public intellectual: a MacArthur Fellowship Award; a Getty Fellowship; and a sundry list of speaking invitations, op-ed pieces, and great teaching gigs.

Then came Davis’s second popular work, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, which provoked widespread controversy because of (1) some of the incredible things he suggests with his arsenal of facts on the hazardous landscape of Southern California and (2) some of the things his detractors suggest about his arsenal of facts on the hazardous landscape of Southern California—to wit, that they aren’t exactly true. The misdirected and almost entirely irrelevant public smear campaign against Davis, spearheaded by a Malibu real estate agent who (for obvious reasons) appointed himself as Davis’s personal van Helsing, only made more people read Davis’s books: Ecology of Fear became a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and City of Quartz got a second run on the list.

Davis’s most recent project, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, is an anthology of essays by various writers about San Diego, the city where Davis grew up and now lives. I visited Davis at his home there, eight days after his wife had given birth to fraternal twins: a boy, named James Conway after the executed leader of the 1916 Irish uprising, and a girl he called Cassandra, “because it was Cassandra who told the stories that the men didn’t want to know.” Davis made me lunch (hummus, olives, bread, salad, Gerolsteiner), and held a sleeping Cassandra during much of the conversation, which began briskly with Davis excitedly telling me about his new series of young adult mystery novels, the second of which, Pirates, Bats, and Dragons, is set in a place called Socotra.

—Joshuah Bearman

I. “THOSE ARE THE ELEMENTS: THE CAVES, THE PIRATES, REAL WITCHES, AND THE LOST LIZARDS”

THE BELIEVER: Never heard of Socotra. Where is it?

MIKE DAVIS: Socotra is an island off the coast of Yemen. It is the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean. It’s full of totally unique flora and fauna. In the ancient world, it was the leading source of frankincense and myrrh. It also has a vast unexplored cave...