Published in 2012, Zane Lovitt's full-length debut The Midnight Promise earned some favourable reviews, and the author has gone onto publish at least one more novel - not a sequel to this one, though. It's an interesting read for a number of reasons.
The first reason is stylistic. The Midnight Promise is described on the front cover as "a detective's story in ten cases". Rather than being a conventional novel, this is actually a series of ten loosely-linked short stories (three of which had previously been published elsewhere), chronicling the adventures - and misadventures - of "Private Inquiry Agent" John Dorn.
The crime short story is, of course, just as venerable a form as the novel. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple have all plied their trade over that form (Holmes more so than the others). The quirk of having the stories loosely linked, though, is an interesting one. Dorn's cases here appear to have taken place over a relatively short period of time, and his decisions and actions in one have an impact on the next. The nearest analogy which comes to mind would be Agatha Christie's collection The Labours of Hercules, in which Poirot attempts to emulate his mythical namesake. Christie territory, however, this is not.
The second reason for the interest here is that Dorn isn't a particularly likeable - or even successful - character. We're not dealing with an incorruptible paragon of justice, by any means. We're not even in the Raymond Chandler noir-fiction world of hard drinking gumshoes who welcome mysterious dames into their office, usually played by Ingrid Bergman.
We're in suburban Melbourne, instead. Dorn is a youngish man who is barely making ends meet in his work, despite being favoured by a moderately high-profile lawyer who employs him to track down information about clients
For fans of Australian crime, the tone here is probably closer to the film Gettin' Square than the Underbelly series. There are no big-time drug kingpins on offer or anything that dramatic. Everyone from Dorn down to the people he investigates is just trying to make a living as best they can.
And therein, I feel, lies the problem. Dorn isn't a character who's particularly interesting to follow. Yes, there's a slightly vicarious thrill of wondering how he's going to derail this case, but there's minimal character development over the 280-odd pages he occupies, and little to explain why he frequently turns out to be...well...a bit of a dickhead, to use the Australian vernacular.
Lest it be said that Dorn is perhaps an anti-hero, I don't think he quite rises to those heights either. The resolutions of most of the cases come without Dorn's input, and a lot of the time that makes him appear to be a spectator in his own stories, which ruins the effect.
To Lovitt's credit, the scenarios he gives Dorn are quite interesting at times. The opening case ("Amnesty") is drolly amusing, and the payoff to "Comedy Is Dead" is quite cleverly-handled, even if it's been telegraphed a few pages earlier. For a private detective who doesn't really get many glamorous investigations, Dorn does at least get some interesting cases.
The downside here, and it's a major one, is that Lovitt's technique is limited. Almost all of the stories are told in roughly the same non-linear way, in which the twist appears in the middle of the plot but at the end of the story. The scenes where Dorn narrates about what happened later on (at the trial, a lot of the time) feel tacked on and an exercise in padding a good idea into a long enough story to publish. Occasionally, too, Lovitt seems unsure whether to make his twist obvious with a sort of "summary" at the end or leave the reader to put the pieces together, which sometimes results in neither option being appropriately followed through.
Indeed, this "telegraphing twists" thing even extends to the very brief introduction, which provides more information than it should about later events.
Judged as a long-form debut, The Midnight Promise is a decent offering. Lovitt's not a bad author, by any means, and even John Dorn could work as a more well-rounded character, rather than the slightly-more-than-two-dimensional character he is here. Judged in relation to the rest of crime fiction, however, The Midnight Promise doesn't live up to the standards of the genre just yet.
Two and a half stars.
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