Little Girl Lost (Richard Aleas, 2004)

I’m glad to start my blog with this little pulp. It’s a debut novel from Richard Aleas, and it seems he put lots of love and knowledge of classic hard-boiled crime novels into this one. We have our lonely hero wandering around the big asphalt jungle trying to find out how his old flame from 10 years ago ended up as a newspaper's headline titled “Stripper found murdered”. The more he finds out, the less he likes it as he sinks deeper and deeper into the big city's depravity and the corruption of the human soul. The big twist and the ending are a bit obvious, but the story is still believable, easy to follow, hard-boiled enough, fast-paced, and there are plenty of intelligently placed clues and unusual characters to make it a real page-turner.

What raises this novel above average is our main protagonist. He’s a modern version of old school type private dick (at the end, you cannot help but think about Sam Spade in Maltese Falcon), but he is not some sort of old guy who can’t keep up with progress and still holds on to old methods. John Blake is in his late twenties, and he’s kind of an inexperienced apprentice to his boss/friend, ex-cop Leo, because he doesn’t really know what to do with his life. He uses the internet (thank god, he is far from some stereotypical genius geek type), isn’t much of a ladies' man (although he does score once!), not very muscular (like his “role models”, he gets beaten a lot) and very capable and resourceful (I liked the way he gets himself from the prison). In short: an excellent merge of classical PI into modern noir. 

As mentioned, the twist is predictable. I mean, you have two beautiful blonde strippers and one of them gets her face blown off to the point where she is unrecognisable. It’s so obvious that I kept thinking the author would use this formula to create some sort of double twist. It doesn’t really happen, which is a shame, but it also doesn’t damage the overall good impression. The ending is still a bit shocking, and more importantly, like in all good books, the journey towards the truth, revelation, and the main protagonist's self-discovery is at least as important as the classical whodunit itself.

I encourage you to go find the little girl lost.

4/5

Facts

Hero: 

John Blake, PI

Location: 

New York

Dames: 

Strippers Miranda aka Randy, Jocelyn aka Jessie, Susan.