Bad Things Happen (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Dolan gets everything right in his debut, a suspense novel that breathes new life into familiar themes. The enigmatic David Loogan, who's recently moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., has stumbled into an editing job for Gray Streets, a mystery magazine, after anonymously submitting a short story. One night, Loogan's boss, Tom Kristoll, asks him for help in disposing of a corpse. Loogan goes to Kristoll's house and does so, despite his suspicions that Kristoll's account of how the man ended up dead is incomplete at best. When Kristoll later dies in a fall from his office window, the police mark Loogan, who's been having an affair with Kristoll's wife, as a person of interest. Pitch-perfect prose and sophisticated characterizations drive the noirish plot, which offers plenty of unexpected twists. Fans of Peter Abrahams and Scott Turow will find a lot to like. While the solution may strike some as a tad improbable, the talent Dolan displays suggests he has a bright future. (July)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson

Harry Dolan's droll and delightful first novel opens with a simple, ominous sentence: "The shovel has to meet certain requirements." This suggests the shovel in question may be intended for other than routine gardening chores. It suggests that, well, bad things may happen, which they soon do, in profusion. We learn that a man who calls himself David Loogan is in a store buying the shovel, rather furtively, and that he is an editor for a crime magazine called Gray Streets in Ann Arbor, Mich. We learn that he has bought the shovel because his boss, Tom Kristoll, the owner of the magazine, wants him to help bury a body. That's the first bad thing that happens. Loogan likes Kristoll and feels guilty about having an affair with Kristoll's wife, Laura. So Loogan accepts his friend's story that he killed the man in his study in self-defense, and that it would cause too much of a fuss to call the police. They bury the man, whom Kristoll says is an ex-convict turned crime writer and extortionist. That, of course, is not remotely true.

For much of the book we don't know much about Loogan, except that he's 38, attractive to women and knows how to juggle. We get to know better the circle of writers and editors who are drawn to Gray Streets, odd characters with odd names like Nathan Hideaway, Rex Chatterjee, Bridget Shellcross, Casimir Hifflyn and Valerie Calnero. Unfortunately, as we get to know these people, they start experiencing death by murder. Tom Kristoll, the publisher, is only the next to go.

"Bad Things Happen" works perfectly well as a straight murder mystery, but it isn't pure realism; there's an air of make-believe here, of fun, as those offbeat names suggest. Even as Dolan enmeshes us in his intricate crime story, he's playing with the foibles of writers and giving us a witty sendup of the crime genre itself. Take, for example, the time-honored scene when the hero is bound and helpless in the grasp of a killer who vows to kill him but, fortunately, keeps talking instead of pulling the trigger. That happens to Loogan and a female cop he's joined up with -- twice in one night. As befits a novel about writers, "Bad Things Happen" contains a good many literary in-jokes. Two of the names Loogan uses, for example, are borrowed from obscure characters in Raymond Chandler works. And there's the "Hamlet" joke. When someone kills an editor, after banging him on the head with a thick volume of Shakespeare's plays, and wants to make the death look like suicide, he leaves "Hamlet" open to "I am more an antique Roman than a Dane," Horatio's lament after Hamlet's death, when Horatio wants to kill himself. That "suicide note" is amusing enough, but the larger joke is that the body count in this novel is rapidly moving beyond that of the celebrated last-act massacre in "Hamlet."

The novel is ingeniously put together. We keep thinking we've spotted the killer, and we keep being wrong. If I say that the novel is as well plotted as Agatha Christie at her best, I don't mean to make it sound old-fashioned; it's not. Even more than Christie, this novel reminded me of Patricia Highsmith. When one character is fatally banged in the head by a bottle of Scotch ("Glenfiddich, nearly full"), I take that as tribute to the scene in "Ripley Under Ground" when a bottle of Margaux wine does the deed. Dolan clearly has the Ripley parallel in mind, because another character keeps referring to "the remarkable Mr. Loogan," with its echo of "The Talented Mr. Ripley," and because there are times when we wonder if Loogan, like Tom Ripley, may not be such a fine fellow after all.

There's some lovely writing here. This, of a teenager: "She slept like a girl in a painting, on her side with her hands-palm-to-palm beneath her cheek." Or this, when Loogan recalls a movie date with a beautiful young woman: "What I remember is sitting close to her in the dark and waiting for something bright to come on the screen so I could turn and look at her face." There's gentle satire of crime writers: "She has a mystery series about an art dealer who solves crimes with the help of her golden retriever." Not that the satire is always gentle; most writers in this novel are given to envy, duplicity and plagiarism, and have homicidal instincts to rival Tony Soprano's gang.

Dolan holds a master's degree in philosophy and spent eight years as the editor of an academic journal before turning to fiction. His novel has won lavish pre-publication praise, but it's probably too clever to be blockbuster material. It's witty, sophisticated, suspenseful and endless fun -- a novel to be savored by people who know and love good crime fiction, and the best first novel I've read this year.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam (July 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399155635
• ISBN-13: 978-0399155635
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (52 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #73,321 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Witty, Wry and Riveting -A No Spoiler Review-, May 29, 2009

By	Miz Ellen "all the letters of my real name" (Bovine Universe) - See all my reviews

Some books are delicious. BAD THINGS HAPPEN is black caviar on 'wry' toast with an extra twist of lemon. Even the plot twists have twists. Mystery fans are in for a treat -- reading this book is like having a glass with a fizzy drink and knocking it down and realizing -gulp- that it was premium champagne!

The first sentence perfectly illustrates the author's deadpan style: "The shovel has to meet certain requirements." By page four, the reader knows for sure that the man calling himself David Loogan wants the shovel to dig a grave. By that time, it's too late to have any thoughts of doing anything else other than to keep reading; one is hooked, line and sinker. No point in fighting, just let yourself be reeled in by this sophisticated noirish mystery set in Ann Arbor, centering on a literary magazine that prints mystery stories. Part of the pleasure is the contrast between the lurid tales the magazine prints with the complicated puzzle that the author sets the reader.

There are layers upon layers of mystery. What is in David Loogan's past? Who is the dead man he helps his friend bury? Who killed the man?

David Loogan is a man of mystery who just wants to lead a quiet life. Tom Kristoll, editor of Gray Streets, discovers that David has a flair for editing. In addition to hiring him to improve the sometimes dreadful stories submitted to his publication, Tom befriends the reclusive stranger. But there are shattering secrets in the literary circle clustered around Tom. Success, disappointment and betrayal can all be motives for murder. And since the suspects are all mystery writers most of the deaths are staged to look like suicide!

This novel is exceptionally rich with characters: the mysterious and resourceful David Loogan, the convivial Tom and his seductive wife Laura, Elizabeth Waishkey the lovely and clever police detective tasked with solving the murders, her daughter Sarah, Michael Beccanti the cat burglar...Harry Dolan seems to invent startling people in the turn of a phrase who seem quite solid and real. Tongue-in-cheek homage is paid to the masters Chandler and Stout and just when you think you have reached the grand conclusion--another twist! The suspense is spun out exquisitely thin and dry before all is over. This is an outstanding debut novel by an exciting new talent that combines taut action with literary sophistication. Highly recommended!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a terrific read for mystery fans, June 3, 2009

By	M. Tanenbaum (Claremont, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

First time novelist Harry Dolan has hit the jackpot with this witty page-turner of a detective novel set in the college town of Ann Arbor. The plot revolves around a mystery magazine, Grey Streets, published out of Ann Arbor, and the owner, his wife, an editor, secretary, and the various writers that write regularly for the magazine. When the owner of the magazine apparently jumps to his death out of his office window, the police quickly discover that he was in fact murdered, setting off a dizzying chain of events that will keep the reader up till late at night. Dolan creates a variety of intriguing characters, including an editor with a mysterious past, an appealing female police detective, a lesbian mystery writer, etc., who have complex interrelationships that will keep the reader guessing as to who is responsible for the string of murders in the novel.

Highly recommended--an entertaining thriller that is sure to keep the reader on the edge of his seat.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars terrific twisting serial killer investigative, July 25, 2009

By	Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews (#1 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

David Loogan lives and hides in Ann Arbor in hope of moving past a violent history that he knows he will never forget. He begins to write a short story for Gray Streets literary crime-fiction journal. Though he never finishes the project, the magazine publisher Tom Kristoll likes what he has seen. He offers David a position as an editor, which he accepts. David, Tom, and his wife Laura become friends.

Tom obtains David's help in dumping a corpse though the former does not believe the latter's explanation. Soon afterward Tom falls to his death from his office window. AAPD Homicide Detective Elizabeth Waishkey suspects David killed Tom especially when evidence surfaces that he slept with Laura. As other people associated with Gray Streets die, single mom Elizabeth focuses even more intensely on David, who conducts his own inquiry to uncover the killer before he is on trial.

The fun in this terrific twisting serial killer investigative tale is the writers who are intelligent and witty until they become the star of someone else's plot. The story line is fast-paced and the amateur sleuth prime suspect and the obstinate cop chasing him makes for an intriguing duel. Mindful of the movies' Theater of Blood and Murder by Death, but less hammy, fans will enjoy Harry Dolan's fine thriller that as Vincent Price said (in Theatre of Blood) is "much ado about murder".

Harriet Klausner