Exposing the seedy heart of Hollywood with a detective to rank beside Philip Marlowe
The private eye novel is the most parodic of literary sub-genres: when Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler established its tone and ambience, they were to a large extent burlesquing the semi-literate stories written for pulp magazines.
It is no surprise then that so ludic a writer as Jonathan Ames – whose CV includes a profane pastiche of P G Wodehouse (Wake Up, Sir!) and the sublime HBO series Bored to Death, about an author called Jonathan Ames who moonlights as a detective – has chosen to embark on what he promises will be a long series of PI tales set in Los Angeles.
This is the second novel to feature Ames’s eccentrically named investigator Happy Doll, following last year’s A Man Named Doll. The bookish, 51-year-old Doll certainly meets Chandler’s criterion for the fictional PI (“down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean…”), being a bit of a softie who says Buddhist prayers for the bad guys he beats up and allows his home to be overrun by ants because he can’t bear to hurt them. And yet, as with Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, even though he is far from realistic, as you read, you feel that he is completely real.
As is traditional, the book begins with a dame in distress: a young woman called Mary DeAngelo who knows that Doll is an old flame of her missing mother, a junkie, and wants him to find her. The investigation is to be bankrolled by her wealthy husband (he tells Doll he earned his money through “the hardest [work there is] … I waited a long time for my parents to die”). Unsurprisingly he has an ulterior motive: in this genre, rich automatically equals corrupt.
Doll heads to the junkie shanty towns of Washington state in search of the missing woman, getting himself involved in a series of violent confrontations that Ames handles as satisfyingly as Lee Child. The prose carries a charge without being self-conscious: the weltschmerz is pleasingly plangent; the spiralling mayhem of the plot beautifully orchestrated.
Ames respects the sacred formula but riffs on it with wonderful freshness. Happy Doll looks set to rank with Marlowe, Lew Archer and Travis McGee as the hero of an endlessly rereadable series of PI novels.
The Wheel of Doll is published by Pushkin at £8.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
