Toughest — and quirkiest —Doll in town
A Man Named Doll
HERE’S THE problem — how to write Hollywood noir with a hardboiled privateeye hero without incurring unfavourable comparisons with Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe.
Jonathan Ames does it by going down the quirky route. For a start, his LA sleuth is called Happy Doll. His parents — Mr and Mrs Doll, father Irish, mother Jewish — gave him the name “hoping things would turn out for the best”. You can probably guess how it is really turning out. If that wasn’t enough to mark him out as different, he virtually chain-smokes joints, has a very close relationship with a rescue dog called George and talks to the flowers in his garden — “you’re so beautiful,” he tells them.
He also talks to his house, which was left to him by a grateful elderly Jewish client. The house is called Frimma, named after the client’s daughter who died in the Holocaust.
Quirky then, but tough, too. Happy has all the macho credentials required by a man in his profession, being both ex-US Navy and ex-LAPD. And, to add an extra layer, he has a tragic backstory which has left him with the kind of mental health issues that would send your average international sports stars into permanent retreat in a Buddhist monastery. Happy copes by a combination of Freudian analysis and injudicious use of alcohol and drugs.
His troubles really begin, however, when he agrees to donate a kidney to a former police colleague. A series of questionable decisions — what he terms “a record streak of stupidity” — swiftly pitches
Happy Doll into a spiral of murder and mayhem during which he racks up quite a body count and sustains an impressive array of injuries, one of them particularly repulsive.
The tale, which includes at one point a visit to an Israeli diamond merchant, rattles along mixing humour, violence and a rather tender love story along with the detective work.
The 200-odd pages fly by. In fact, it’s all over rather too quickly. Fortunately, Ames, whose previous work, You Were Never Really Here, was made into a hit movie, is on the case and a second Doll story should appear next year. Happy days.