The wheel of Doll

Imagine that Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer was trying to put his violent life behind him and become a Buddhist. That's the situation in which old-school PI Happy Doll finds himself in this pulse-pounding sequel to A Man Named Doll (2021). Sadly, it's probably fair to say that no Buddhist-in-training has ever fallen quite so far off the path as Doll does here. It starts with an archetypal visit to the PI's L.A. office from a pretty woman named Mary, who identifies herself as the daughter of Doll's former lover Inez, a heroin-addicted prostitute who vanished many years ago. Mary wants to find her mother, who may be living in Olympia, Washington, possibly in a homeless shelter. Before you can say "samsara" (the Buddhist name for cyclical suffering, or, in this case, "the deluded wish to save someone who could not be saved"), Happy has embarked on a blood-spattered road trip to hell and back (or, to Olympia and back through Oregon, L.A., and finally Joshua Tree). How many times is Happy shot, pummelled, and otherwise assaulted (once by a cat) along the way? How many bodies is he required to stow in the trunks of cars? How much cocaine does he snort to keep himself going? If you really want to know, keep your abacus handy (even Happy loses count). Although set in the present, this is an ode to the classic hard-boiled novel of the forties and fifties, but it's also much more. Ames is a many-faceted writer, able to interlace a tender-hearted and profoundly moving love story (told mostly in flashbacks to Happy's brief life with Inez) just below the blood-soaked surface. There's plenty of Chandler and Spillane here, but there's also that special brand of drug-fueled poetry and violence that gave Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers its power.

Hard-boiled PI fiction set in the present doesn't get much better than Ames's gritty and moving second novel featuring L.A. gumshoe Happy Doll (after 2021's A Man Named Doll). Doll revisits his past when he gets a new client, Mary DeAngelo, who hires him to find her missing mother, last seen in Olympia, Wash. Mary explains that she's approached Doll, rather than an Olympia investigator, because her mother, Ines Candle, was briefly Doll's girlfriend. Doll hasn't seen Ines, a troubled soul whom the detective saved from a wrist-slitting suicide attempt, for years, but the pleasurable moments they shared prompts him to accept the case. What Doll finds when he gets to Olympia is depressing and leads to multiple murders. The Raymond Chandler--esque plot is enhanced by superior prose: a handshake is described as "a violent squeeze, the kind that religious zealots or football coaches give, to show you they're real men, men of strength, with an undercurrent of sadism." Devotees of Loren Estleman's long-running PI Amos Walker series will hope Doll has a similarly enduring career. Agent: Eric Simonoff, William Morris Endeavor. (Sept.)