"A brother Shamus? You mean like an Irish monk?"
Fade to Blonde (2004)
by Max Phillips
220 pages - Hard Case Crime
Ray Corson moved out to Los Angeles following his dream of being a writer, but ended up just getting one or two roles as an extra in films, and then working some odd jobs, including being a bodyguard, before settling in on being a sort of handyman. But his life changes when an odd-looking blonde, Rebecca LaFontaine, seeks him out and hires him to deal with a gangster who's been bothering her - deal with him by killing him, if necessary. But Corson wants to investigate more first, and ends up moving through dope parties and gangster-run clubs and other fixtures of 1950s California. This book won the 2005 Shamus Award for best paperback original.
The author Phillips is apparently more of a 'literary' author who wrote this novel for reasons I'm not sure of, but are probably easy to guess. And there's signficant skill displayed in the prose; in sharp, well-drawn descriptions of people and places, and the noir-style wisecracks that are peppered throughout ("Her hair was done Kim Novak-style and blonde enough to hurt. You could have sterilized a cut by running your fingers through that hair." pg.151). But unfortunately it's all in the service of a plot that's not just ludicrous, but entirely incomprehensible in the way it plays out. I have no idea why any of the things happen, or why the characters act the way they do. Someone hires you to 'stop/kill' another person, and so you start investigating every scrap of paper you come across, join a mob and start into the drug trade, get all Dirty Harry on brothels, etc? Maybe I just missed something, but the motivations didn't make any sense to me at all. Which ruined the enjoyment of what could have been a good read.
There was also a definite air of mean-spiritedness that didn't sit right with me, and wasn't necessary merely to be faithful to the characters and their world.