The first on my BritNoir pile is Liza Cody, _Dupe._ I love
Cody's Eva Wylie books for their rendering of the life of a
woman at the bottom of the social strata--truly
hardboiled.
I can make a case for this book as
hardboiled. Anna Lee, the protagonist, was a cop for a couple
of years before she tired of typing and making coffee and
joined a private detective agency run by a retired cop. There
she faces the same struggles to do real work instead of girly
stuff like retail theft. In this book, the agency undertakes
looking into the traffic accident death of a young woman
who's left her Thatcherite well-to-do suburban family to make
a career in movies. She's secretive and was rarely in touch
with her parents, who wonder what she'd been doing the last 3
years. Then there's the niggling question of how the car
crash could have taken place as described, as she was a
skilled driver who'd as a teenager piloted her father's
company's car in races. The agency head sees this job as one
of pacifying grieving relatives, so, of course, Anna gets the
assignment, and, of course, things are not as they
seem.
Anna seems proper as compared with
Eva, but she is making her own way in the world. She's
attacked and physically holds her own with a career thug. She
"has" a cat who makes its way in and out of her apartment
through a broken skylight. She isn't given to the vapors and
doesn't have invisible means of financial support. She can
get along with the various denizens of the top and the bottom
she encounters. One of the missing woman's former roommates
is a brash and likable working-class woman whose speech and
manners remind me of the common touch Cody shows with Eva. I
liked this book a lot, and I'll be looking for the rest of
these OOPs.
Still, I think this book is a PI that
is not quite hardboiled.
Joy, who next read Charles Higson's _King of the Ants_
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