Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe is the model for how many private investigators? He defines that hero in The Simple Art of Murder. “He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct….” Gabriel Valjan introduces Shane Cleary as just that type of man in Dirty Old Town.

Cleary’s mean streets are Boston. When he returned from Vietnam he became a cop. When he was too honest to be a cop, he testified against one of them, breaking the police code, and made himself a target for most police officers in town. Now, in 1975, he’s sleeping in his office because he doesn’t have the money to pay the rent on his apartment. Then he hears from Brayton Braddock, the wealthy man who married Cleary’s girlfriend, Catherine. Although Cleary never liked Bray, he needs the job and the money.

Braddock is being blackmailed. He’s working on a development project with other power brokers in town, and someone has copies of his ledgers. He hires Shane to find and stop the blackmailer. Before Shane can get too far into the case, Bill, a fellow veteran and a cop with a secret asks Cleary to do him a favor. A man named Roger Sherman is missing, and Bill asks Cleary to find him.

Valjan includes a list of characters in the book, a list that is invaluable. As Cleary investigates, he finds himself in gay clubs, business offices, a bar in the wrong section of town, a soul food restaurant, and a dead man’s apartment. He’s suddenly a suspect in two murders, on the run from the cops, and assisted by unlikely people along the way, everyone from a professor to a street entertainer to a Mafia don. Cleary’s actions as a police officer made him enemies on the force, but he finds people who remember in unlikely places.

When you think of hardboiled detective novels,  do you think of a man in a small office, barely making a living, with a sarcastic wit, and a reputation that makes him an enemy of the cops? Do you think about a man with a troubled past, and a world-weary view of the present? How about a man with a cynical view about dames, but a man attracted to the wrong ones? Of course, he’s a white knight, determined to do good. Oh, and don’t forget the hat. But, Shane Cleary is warned by his friend, Professor Lindsey. “Your idealism, while admirable, is from a bygone era.”

I also think of beautiful writing with a clipped turn of phrase. Every sentence in those hardboiled novels paint a picture. Valjan has that talent with phrases such as “Outside the air, severe and cold as as the city’s forefathers”.  At one point Cleary sums up the action in the book, and concludes with “Now Boston journalists were one keystroke away from writing my obituary.” It took me a while to read this slim book. The writing is worth close attention.

Gabriel Valjan puts his own spin on the stereotypical PI novel in this atmospheric period piece set in the mid-70s. It’s a short, dense story, a complicated case that is too involved to read quickly. He introduces a detective who fits in perfectly with his idols, Marlowe and Spade. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Dennis Lehane’s Patrick Kenzie may have dominated their Boston. Shane Cleary is a welcome addition to Boston’s mean streets, to the Dirty Old Town.

Gabriel Valjan’s website is http://www.gabrielvaljan.com/

Dirty Old Town by Gabriel Valjan. Level Best Books, 2020. ISBN 9781947915442 (paperback), 160p.

*****
FTC Full Disclosure – The author sent a copy of the book, hoping I would review it.