In a ‘50s quagmire, struggling to escape

WHEN teaching writing, I often cite Janis Joplin’s lyric “O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz” as the story of our lives: from grand expectations to “prove that you love me and buy the next round” in 40 seconds flat. That last, long promontory surrounded by sea is a thing many of us know too well, the very stuff of noir.

Sara Gran knows it, too, as “Dope,” her take on the classic paperback novel, demonstrates.

So return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. It’s 1950s New York, where heroin is becoming a huge problem in a city already rotting from within. Hell’s Kitchen -- with its flophouses, barrooms, cheap tenements, automats and greasy spoons -- pretty much defines the city, with no Officer Friendly anywhere to be had. The cops are cut from the same cloth as the rats and other survivors.

Josephine is one of those survivors. Off smack but craving it every moment, supporting herself with petty thievery and scams, Josephine is hired to find a missing girl. The trail carries her into the past. She finds the girl. But she also finds again the city’s pale, drained underbelly of dealers, pimps, women with whom she once walked the streets, even her husband. Her old life is still out there, still waiting like a suit of clothes to be shrugged back on. Finally at the end of her search, Josephine comes to a familiar sort of place.

“Jezebel’s was the place girls go when they’re tired of hustling and tired of trying and tired of being pretty and tired of scoring and just plain tired, exhausted and beat,” Gran writes. “No one’s looking for girls at Jezebel’s. No one wants them. Maybe once they had families and friends and fellows, but not anymore. To the rest of the world they’re dead already. It’s only them that can’t see it. It’s only the girls themselves who think that somehow, in some way they still matter. That they’re still alive.”

Nearly every page has surprises, from triple-axel plot twists to Josephine’s impetuously throwing a rock through the window of a house in an upscale, commuter neighborhood representing everything she can never know, never have. The story is rife, as well, with gems of Chandler-esque description: “She was pretty enough, if you didn’t like personality in your women.... She wore a black suit that showed nothing and didn’t seem to be hiding much of anything at all, and too much makeup over a face that looked just this side of being alive.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the ending is far from a happy or comfortable one. Or that Josephine turns out to be not quite the survivor she believes she is.

In its purest form, the crime novel is always about the eruption of the past into the present: tearing its way up through daily events, making sand of hard faith, precipitating action. Within the limits of his or her character, the protagonist struggles valiantly to set things right. But all too often what the protagonist has by way of character is a popgun and what he or she needs, like Josephine, is a cannon.

James Sallis is the author of the novels “Drive” and the forthcoming “Cripple Creek.”