Bad Things Happen

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Dolan gets everything right in his debut, a suspense novel that breathes new life into familiar themes. The enigmatic David Loogan, who's recently moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., has stumbled into an editing job for Gray Streets , a mystery magazine, after anonymously submitting a short story. One night, Loogan's boss, Tom Kristoll, asks him for help in disposing of a corpse. Loogan goes to Kristoll's house and does so, despite his suspicions that Kristoll's account of how the man ended up dead is incomplete at best. When Kristoll later dies in a fall from his office window, the police mark Loogan, who's been having an affair with Kristoll's wife, as a person of interest. Pitch-perfect prose and sophisticated characterizations drive the noirish plot, which offers plenty of unexpected twists. Fans of Peter Abrahams and Scott Turow will find a lot to like. While the solution may strike some as a tad improbable, the talent Dolan displays suggests he has a bright future. (July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks Magazine Compared to works by Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, and Patricia Highsmith, Bad Things Happen rated as a "brilliant first novel" ( Chicago Tribune ) and "the best first novel [of the] year" ( Washington Post ) among most critics. They praised Dolan's crisp, minimalist prose and well-developed, flesh-and-blood protagonists. Dolan's intricate plot, full of surprising twists and turns, eschews showdowns and shootouts in favor of droll dialogue and a noirish, Chandleresque tone. Though the San Francisco Chronicle deplored the glut of subplots and secondary characters, most reviewers agreed that Dolan's debut effort is stylish, sharp-edged, and suspenseful. "It's probably too clever to be blockbuster material," lamented the Washington Post , but readers in search of a literate mystery are in for a treat. From Booklist *Starred Review* Take a ride on the mean streets of . . . Ann Arbor? This tasty tale employs the somewhat common trope of crime among crime writers to decidedly uncommon effect. David Loogan, a man with a mysterious past, tries his hand at writing a short story for Gray Streets, a literary crime-fiction journal. His inability to stop tinkering with it lands him an editing job, leading to friendship with the popular editor Tom Kristoll and his wife, Laura. But then Loogan sleeps with Laura, Tom is defenstrated, and Loogan is on a hunt for the killer, despite constant reminders that “this isn’t a story from Gray Streets.” Oh, but it is. As more people die, every character, every motive—and every conceivable combination of characters and motives—must be considered, and Loogan’s own actions put him at odds with an equally determined detective, Elizabeth Waishkey. This murderer’s row of writers, editors, and interns would kill for good editing—or maybe because of it. Dolan’s neatly symmetrical plot is tight, his dialogue is crisp, and his humor wry. (Rarely have suspects been so archly articulate.) A twisty whodunit with a thriller’s pace, Bad Things Happen lends new meaning to the term ghostwriters. --Keir Graff Harry Dolan is the bestselling author of Bad Things Happen . xa0He graduated from Colgate University, where he majored in philosophy and studied fiction-writing with the novelist Frederick Busch. xa0A native of Rome, New York, he now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. From The Washington Post From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Patrick Anderson Harry Dolan's droll and delightful first novel opens with a simple, ominous sentence: "The shovel has to meet certain requirements." This suggests the shovel in question may be intended for other than routine gardening chores. It suggests that, well, bad things may happen, which they soon do, in profusion. We learn that a man who calls himself David Loogan is in a store buying the shovel, rather furtively, and that he is an editor for a crime magazine called Gray Streets in Ann Arbor, Mich. We learn that he has bought the shovel because his boss, Tom Kristoll, the owner of the magazine, wants him to help bury a body. That's the first bad thing that happens. Loogan likes Kristoll and feels guilty about having an affair with Kristoll's wife, Laura. So Loogan accepts his friend's story that he killed the man in his study in self-defense, and that it would cause too much of a fuss to call the police. They bury the man, whom Kristoll says is an ex-convict turned crime writer and extortionist. That, of course, is not remotely true. For much of the book we don't know much about Loogan, except that he's 38, attractive to women and knows how to juggle. We get to know better the circle of writers and editors who are drawn to Gray Streets, odd characters with odd names like Nathan Hideaway, Rex Chatterjee, Bridget Shellcross, Casimir Hifflyn and Valerie Calnero. Unfortunately, as we get to know these people, they start experiencing death by murder. Tom Kristoll, the publisher, is only the next to go. "Bad Things Happen" works perfectly well as a straight murder mystery, but it isn't pure realism; there's an air of make-believe here, of fun, as those offbeat names suggest. Even as Dolan enmeshes us in his intricate crime story, he's playing with the foibles of writers and giving us a witty sendup of the crime genre itself. Take, for example, the time-honored scene when the hero is bound and helpless in the grasp of a killer who vows to kill him but, fortunately, keeps talking instead of pulling the trigger. That happens to Loogan and a female cop he's joined up with -- twice in one night. As befits a novel about writers, "Bad Things Happen" contains a good many literary in-jokes. Two of the names Loogan uses, for example, are borrowed from obscure characters in Raymond Chandler works. And there's the "Hamlet" joke. When someone kills an editor, after banging him on the head with a thick volume of Shakespeare's plays, and wants to make the death look like suicide, he leaves "Hamlet" open to "I am more an antique Roman than a Dane," Horatio's lament after Hamlet's death, when Horatio wants to kill himself. That "suicide note" is amusing enough, but the larger joke is that the body count in this novel is rapidly moving beyond that of the celebrated last-act massacre in "Hamlet." The novel is ingeniously put together. We keep thinking we've spotted the killer, and we keep being wrong. If I say that the novel is as well plotted as Agatha Christie at her best, I don't mean to make it sound old-fashioned; it's not. Even more than Christie, this novel reminded me of Patricia Highsmith. When one character is fatally banged in the head by a bottle of Scotch ("Glenfiddich, nearly full"), I take that as tribute to the scene in "Ripley Under Ground" when a bottle of Margaux wine does the deed. Dolan clearly has the Ripley parallel in mind, because another character keeps referring to "the remarkable Mr. Loogan," with its echo of "The Talented Mr. Ripley," and because there are times when we wonder if Loogan, like Tom Ripley, may not be such a fine fellow after all. There's some lovely writing here. This, of a teenager: "She slept like a girl in a painting, on her side with her hands-palm-to-palm beneath her cheek." Or this, when Loogan recalls a movie date with a beautiful young woman: "What I remember is sitting close to her in the dark and waiting for something bright to come on the screen so I could turn and look at her face." There's gentle satire of crime writers: "She has a mystery series about an art dealer who solves crimes with the help of her golden retriever." Not that the satire is always gentle; most writers in this novel are given to envy, duplicity and plagiarism, and have homicidal instincts to rival Tony Soprano's gang. Dolan holds a master's degree in philosophy and spent eight years as the editor of an academic journal before turning to fiction. His novel has won lavish pre-publication praise, but it's probably too clever to be blockbuster material. It's witty, sophisticated, suspenseful and endless fun -- a novel to be savored by people who know and love good crime fiction, and the best first novel I've read this year. Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. Read more