What do you do when you’re innocently minding your own business mining the news headlines for realistic plot devices for your novel and all of a sudden, you realize people aren’t killing each other as much anymore (here, at least–like everything else, killing has apparently been shipped offshore). This is the plight of the mystery writer trying to keep it street.

AROUND 8 o’clock on a breezy evening in 1992, two private investigators stepped out of their car at the Christopher Street pier in Greenwich Village and approached a group of drunks and addicts huddled over a small fire. The investigators were soon joined by three Chinatown gang members who had information that the investigators needed. But the conversation was brief; the gang leader had a temper, and guns were drawn fast.

That was the opening salvo in a chaotic scene that also featured undercover police officers dressed as winos, a surprise attack by another gang from a car speeding along the West Side Highway, and a double-cross scheme by a member of the first gang.

The encounter combined some of the most characteristic elements of New York crime during that decade, which began with 2,245 homicides in 1990 and enveloped the city in a fog of fear. And though the shootout was purely imaginary — a scene from S. J. Rozan’s 1994 novel “China Trade” — it fully reflects the spirit of those tumultuous years.

Such scenes are much harder to imagine in today’s New York.

Not where I lived, man.