An old friend from the force visits LA private investigator Happy “Hank” Doll with a proposition: a big payday in exchange for his kidney. And then his friend is shot dead with some shady characters sniffing around for the money. As more dead people start inconveniently popping up in Doll’s life, making the cops look hard at him to see if he’s a crazed serial killer, he sets out to avenge his friend’s death. All in a day’s work for A Man Named Doll.
Jonathan Ames has written noir-ish stories throughout his career, starting with the less successful I Pass Like Night to short stories like Bored to Death and You Were Never Really Here, both of which were adapted into a great TV show and decent movie. He returns to the genre with A Man Named Doll, the first in an ongoing crime/modern LA noir series, and it’s not bad.
The staples are all there: the private detective, the person who enters his office in the first chapter setting off the chain of events, the booze, the dame, getting knocked around by low-lifes, etc. Ames plays it all well without making it feel cliched or knowing, and his prose style is deceptively simple and accessible with the story unfolding smoothly, so that the novel is a pleasantly breezy read.
The story slows down a bit in the second act when Doll goes on the obligatory stake-out. I know why it had to happen but that whole section is dull. Doll himself is not that distinctive a character - he’s a basic private detective-type that readers of this genre will have seen before - and, similarly, the story generally is fairly unmemorable. I didn’t dislike it but it doesn’t stand out as remarkable or even remotely new and I don’t expect to remember it for long.
Still, it’s not too boring either and I enjoyed it enough to want to check out the next book. While not among Jonathan Ames’ best fiction, if you’re in the mood for a decent modern LA noir tale, A Man Named Doll is worth a look.
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