Plans go wrong. Bad things happen. People die.

That’s the formula for the stories published in Gray Streets, the fictional crime magazine at the heart of Harry Dolan’s entertaining debut, and it’s also a pretty accurate description of the novel itself. So accurate, in fact, that Ebury Press have used it as their front cover strapline. I quite like all three of those things to happen in a novel and I’ve read my fair share where they occur in varying order, so I was pleasantly surprised to have my cynical expectations held aloft and laughed at by Bad Things Happen.

Ann Arbor, Michigan. A man “who calls himself” David Loogan befriends Tom Kristoll, morose editor of Gray Streets and a crime story aficionado. It’s a friendship based on mutual respect for one another’s secrets but when Loogan begins an ill-advised affair with Tom’s wife Laura, it kicks off an increasingly dangerous chain of events. Within just a few chapters, Tom is calling Loogan up in the middle of the night and asking him to come over and help him out of a fix:

“Oh,” Tom says, “and bring a shovel…”

From there, Dolan spins out a tale that takes in all of the conventions of populist crime fiction and turns them gleefully on their heads. Loogan has to contend with a shady group of crime novelists connected to Gray Streets who may or may not know more than they’re letting on about the bodies that keep on piling up (and who delight in informing him of the clichés of crime fiction just a few pages before they are subverted) while at the same time wrestling with his own dark past and the complicated web that’s closing in around him. Dolan keeps up a ferocious pace, while the twists are unexpected and, for the most part, believable. There are perhaps one too many at the finale, although the fact that Dolan is working on a follow-up suggests they were necessary in order to propel the surviving characters into the next adventure.

And what great characters these are. The confederate of crime authors, including veteran Nathan Hideaway and the sprightly Bridget Shellcross (who writes books about a female detective and her sleuthing dog), are a wonderful creation, drawn with an affectionate detail one suspects was not entirely the work of Dolan’s imagination. And then there’s Tom Kristoll, with his rain mac and fedora, who embodies the sort of private dick that Chandler and co made their stock-in-trade, but with an additional sad self-awareness that lends him an authenticity in-keeping with the realist noir world Dolan has crafted. Loogan himself is relatively anodyne, but this works in context. He’s a man with a history, and for it to remain that way he now has to be as quiet as possible. His only mistake is in submitting a story to Gray Streets: soon after, he finds himself starring in one. But perhaps the greatest success is Detective Elizabeth Waishkey, who carries the story at about the same weighting as Loogan. She’s doing her best to raise Sarah, her smart teenage daughter, and solve the mystery with Loogan at its centre, and her love for the former develops into compassion for the latter when Loogan displays kindness towards Sarah. Later in the novel, when Loogan is on the run, he and Elizabeth’s sparring over the phone has a playfulness – and a grit – that feels like a tongue-in-cheek homage to Jack Foley and Karen Sisco in Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight. Whenever that phone rings and Elizabeth answers with, “Where are you, Loogan?” – knowing full well he’ll never tell her – the ensuing exchange is always a delight.

There are quite a few novels of this ilk being released at the moment, and the tendency is to find elaborate ways to differentiate them from the crowd, often to the detriment of character or pace. Thankfully, Dolan has stuck with a story that’s simple and well-told, but developed it into something that feels both fresh and timeless. He cleverly messes with the tropes of the genre like an old pro, without losing sight of what the reader demands from these tales: plans going wrong, bad things happening and people dying. Roll on book two.

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