Already Dead - Charlie Huston

Joe Pitts isn’t your usual kind of Private Investigator, but the case he has been assigned is a familiar one. The daughter of a rich family has gone missing – a wild child, she’s headed off to the city to slum it and there’s no knowing what kind of trouble she’s going to get into. Her mother, who is a bit of a lush, has hired Joe, as she’s heard that he has the right kind of contacts in the underworld of Alphabet City. The father wants to keep up appearances and doesn’t want the likes of Joe around, so he demands discretion, and wants him to report to him rather than the mother. It turns out that their daughter is in a lot more trouble than you can imagine, and so is Joe, who gets slipped a mickey and takes a few knocks. Sound familiar?  Well, the only ‘Big Sleep’ about this one is the terminal condition of Joe Pitt. He’s already dead - a Vamprye.

Joe is part of the underworld in Alphabet City that the ordinary citizens know nothing about, pushing the Vamypre clans underground, forcing them into rival clans who look after and prey on their own turf, trying to keep it clean from a nasty Zombie infestation (or should that be Victims of Zombification?). Joe however has stumbled into something much worse – there’s a carrier around who is more than just the regular mindless shambling brain eater – and with the various factions, hoods, enclaves, clans and societies more than a little upset with him for not clearing up the mess. With a young rich girl missing and dangerous rivals watching and hampering his every move, Joe finds himself in the middle of a very messy and dangerous situation.

There’s all kinds of reasons why grafting horror and detective fiction together shouldn’t work, but Charlie Huston is oblivious to them, mastering both genres with aplomb, merging the dark streets that a vampire haunts with the “mean streets a man must go who is not himself necessarily mean” of Chandler’s Private Investigator. And a Vampyre has all the right characteristics of the reluctant, fatalistic loner with the necessarily brutality for the harsh, dark world he lives in – one that regular people know nothing about. The action flows along as it should and the writing is sharp with a hard-boiled edge we are unaccustomed to see in a horror novel.  This really shouldn’t work just as well as it does, but Huston adds something new here to horror mythology and does it exceptionally well. I’m looking forward to the next Joe Pitt case.