Like a classic hard-boiled detective tale, the origin story for Happy Doll, the private eye at the center of Jonathan Ames’ series of crime novels, begins with the arrival of an unexpected offer.
The invitation Ames got came from Lee Child, the best-selling author of the Jack Reacher thriller series, who asked him to contribute to “Nicotine Chronicles,” part of Akashic Books’ series of noir fiction, this one to feature cigarettes at the heart of each story.
Ames, who knew Child from a reading they’d done together, was a quick yes.
SEE ALSO: Like books? Get our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more
“I got this assignment to write a $250 short story, and was very excited to be in an anthology edited by Lee Child,” Ames says on a video call from his Spanish bungalow in Beachwood Canyon. “And I started writing what became ‘A Man Named Doll,’ because the premise of that book is a friend of his, through excessive smoking over decades, smoked himself out of two kidneys.
“I got about 10, 15 pages in and I thought, you know what? This is longer than a $250 short story,” he says. “I think I have something here. I’ll write something else for the anthology, which I did.”
“A Man Named Doll” landed in 2021, and a second book, “The Wheel of Doll,” a year later. This month the third book in the series, “Karma Doll,” arrives, the latest in Ames’ series of modern-day hard-boiled noir fiction inspired by his deep love of the genre.
Happy Doll is his real name though the circumstances of how he got it are anything but joyful. A retired LAPD detective now in private practice, he exhibits many of the classic traits of the type – a damaged soul who drinks a bit too much, wisecracks at the wrong people, and constantly finds himself on the wrong end of a bad guy’s knife, gun, fist, you name it.
In “Karma Doll,” which, like its predecessors includes moments of black comedy, Doll has headed to Mexico to get a bullet wound patched up – he’d been shot at the climax of the previous book, which ends 12 or so hours before this one begins.
Doll settles into a remote village on the Mexican coast with his beloved part-Chihuahua George, studying Buddhism and fishing for his dinner, until trouble turns up and he returns to L.A. to face the past he’d fled.
Gateway to crime
Ames, who was born in New York City and lived both there and in New Jersey until moving to Los Angeles a dozen years ago, published his first novel, “I Pass Like Night,” in 1989. His second, “The Extra Man,” arrived in 1998, and was later adapted into a film starring Kevin Kline, Paul Dano and Katie Holmes. A third novel, “Wake Up Sir,” landed in 2004.
All fell generally under the genre of literary fiction, and that might have been where he stayed but for the gift of a Raymond Chandler book some years earlier.
“A friend of mine was a huge Chandler fan, and he must have given me ‘The Big Sleep,’ in probably 1987,” Ames says. “I began reading and re-reading all of Chandler’s oeuvre, and then at some point, I switched to (Dashiell) Hammett.
“Those were my gateway drugs, as it were, into the world of the private detective story,” he says. “In both cases, I loved their prose.”
With his 2007 short story “Bored To Death,” which was adapted into an HBO series starring Jason Schwartzman and Ted Danson, Ames cracked open the door to detective fiction.
“The short story was about a writer – I used my own name – who so loves detective fiction that he wants to be a detective and puts an ad on Craigslist,” Ames says. “It was my first attempt at anything a little bit hardboiled, but I was also using the voice of the comedic autobiographical essays I had written at the time.”
Ames had stopped writing novels while the show was in production, but sometime after HBO canceled it he decided to return to prose and go all in on crime fiction. He wrote a novella, “You Were Never Really Here,” which was adapted into a movie starring Joaquin Phoenix as its Jack Reacher-esque hero.
Not long after that, Reacher’s creator Lee Child called, and Ames took up the trail of Happy Doll.
Turning pages
The archetype of the solitary private investigator, struggling to see the world through all its shadows, increasingly appealed to Ames. The speed at which detective fiction moved was equally attractive.
“It’s this thing of wanting to create the sensation of a page-turner. I’m a huge fan of the Richard Stark novels, the Donald Westlake pseudonym about the character Parker. Same thing with Michael Connelly. The propulsion, loving that as a reading experience.
“The investigator, he’s on a mission and trying to figure something, and so it can become like a metaphor for figuring yourself out,” he says. “The struggle we have to know who we are, or the mystery of being alive.
“I remember taking a literature course in college where the professor said that Oedipus was the first private detective because he was trying to solve this mystery of his father, this murder,” Ames continues. “What did he discover? Oh my God, he had killed his father and slept with his mother. I mean, what a revelation he came to.”
The structures of crime fiction, especially in a series, also felt comfortable.
“It gives you a form, which I think as an artist can be helpful,” Ames says. “To know, ‘I’m in these parameters. I’m presented with a problem, a case, and eventually have to solve it. Then, in the middle, you can do other things like describe nature or inner conflict.
“I once said this to a fellow novelist, who every book she writes, she’s reinventing the wheel,” he says. “My friend, she’s got to reinvent how she’s going to tell the story every time. With me, with these detective novels, someone’s going to come to him with a problem. That becomes his problem, and he goes on a journey. So I don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”
In Chandler’s L.A.
“Karma Doll,” like the two Doll books before, is well grounded in Los Angeles. Doll’s home in Beachwood Canyon beneath the Hollywood Sign is based on Ames’ own home.
Doll drinks at the Dresden Room, a mid-century time capsule of a bar and restaurant in Los Feliz, and keeps a small office across Vermont Avenue. In the new book, key scenes take place at the El Royale Apartments, a 1929 historic building on Rossmore Avenue in Hollywood.
“What you see out your window, and maybe it was Hemingway who said this, you kind of want to capture,” Ames says of the real places and history salted throughout his books.
“As a New Yorker, I had maybe certain biases against L.A. or dismissed it,” he says. “Then I came out here for work, and it was beautiful for my eyes and my mind to be in a new environment. There’s that French term, ‘jolie laide,’ ugly beautiful, because you have a lot of the ugliness of over-development and dreary urban blight. But then you have some glorious architecture, and you have all this nature that just wants to overtake everything, and the flow of humanity.”
And as a crime novelist, you have touchstones, real or fictional, everywhere one looks, he adds.
“Chandler made L.A. this fertile ground of light and dark, of beauty and Hollywood, glamor and the darker side of human nature,” Ames says. “And like a Chandler addict, I live in Beachwood Canyon, which is prime Chandler country, because that whole Franklin Avenue corridor is where Marlowe lived. And his office was on Argyle and Hollywood.
“Up the street, on Heather Road, is the central location of his short story, ‘Find the Girl,’ which then became the story he cannibalized to write ‘Farewell My Lovely.’ I would drive past Heather Road, which he described, and I saw the house he described.
“You know, there are people who love the Bible and love going to Israel and the Middle East and walking through biblical places. For me, I’m like in Chandler biblical territory here. This is where Marlowe was running around.”
Complicated character
While the landscape that Doll moves through might be familiar to Philip Marlowe, Ames decided to have the character of Doll stray from the stoic template of the classic noir detectives.
“It was like, ‘How do I do something that Chandler and Hammett and Ross Macdonald, who were maybe the three big role models, didn’t really do?” Ames says. “Or Richard Stark with Parker? We don’t really know what makes these guys tick. We get maybe some of their backstory. Maybe a little bit with Ross Macdonald and Lew Archer, but not much.
“I felt like, not that I was doing something modern, but like I need to understand this guy,” he says. “Why does he make these bad choices or confused choices?”
So just as he’d used his own home as a model for Doll’s house, and his own beloved dog Fezzik as inspiration for Doll’s George, Ames pulled small bits and pieces of his own personality into the mix of Doll’s.
“I’ve had a long-standing fascination with psychoanalysis – I’ve done it, still do,” he says of the four or five-day-a-week sessions Doll does with his analyst. “I had developed a real interest and appreciation for Eastern philosophy and Buddhist philosophy.
“I was very fortunate as an undergraduate to have Joyce Carol Oates as my teacher,” he says. “She told me very early on – I was writing my thesis for her, which became my first novel – that I could take an element of myself and create a whole character out of it.
“Always in my mind, I imagine, almost like taking a little bit of DNA, putting it in some petri dish, and then creating a human being,” he says. “I take ingredients from my own life and give them to Doll, but then they change because he’s not me.”
Doll in Hollywood
Ames has recently started work on the fourth Doll book, this one taking place about a year after the events of “Karma Doll.”
“I could give away the title, I guess, I hope it’s not premature,” he says. “It’s tentatively ‘Hollywood Doll,’ because, you know, Marlowe and Archer, they often get involved in the movie business or situations there.”
Someday, Doll might be part of Hollywood, too, Ames says, noting that while an option Netflix held for the first book has lapsed, he’s still interested in seeing Doll adapted for a movie or TV series.
“Michael Connelly, what a universe he’s created,” Ames says of the best-selling author of books featuring characters such as Harry Bosch, Mickey Haller, and Renee Ballard, all of whom have or will have their own series.
“Also Robert Crais,” he says of the creator of the Elvis Cole and Joe Pike characters, for which the 20th book in the series was just released. “I was reading Crais before I discovered Connelly. I imagine Crais has had his books optioned.
In addition to “Bored To Death,” Ames also created the Starz series “Blunt Talk” starring Patrick Stewart, which provides a realistic understanding of what it takes to get any project made in Hollywood.
“I’ve called it like a Swiss watch of luck,” he says. “Like all the pieces have got to move just right, as beautiful as a Swiss watch, and then you need this little ingredient of luck.”