A Bad Night's Sleep

A Bad Night's Sleep, by Michael Wiley, is the most recent winner of the Shamus Award, given annually to the best novel featuring a private detective. Wiley's detective is Joe Kozmarski, a former cop during private eye in Chicago. While the book is fairly engaging, it's also fairly familiar, as Kozmarski struggles with his alcoholism, has an ex-wife he's still in love with, and tends to get into really difficult situations.

Hired to find out who's stealing from construction sites, Kozmarski is shocked to see, as he stakes one such site, that it is cops who are doing the stealing. During the ensuing shoot out he ends up killing a cop who is shooting at other cops. He's arrested, becomes a media bad guy, but then gets recruited by the bad cops to help them set up a protection racket against the city's gangs.

There's a lot of circumlocutions is this book, and people seem to be shifting sides often, but the core of it is police corruption. They are taking in so much money and so powerful that they run a high class members-only brothel. Meanwhile, Kozmarski, like any down and out detective, at least has his integrity, and works with the police to bust the bad cops.

Raymond Chandler and a few other writers, such as Laurence Block, kind of spoiled it for writers in this genre because so often it sounds like rip-offs of their work. Kozmarski is a kind of mixture of Matthew Scudder and V.I. Warshawski (a creation of Sara Paretsky), except that unlike Scudder, Kozmarski still indulges in drink occasionally. But like Warshawski, he has a tender side, especially concerning his mother and the nephew he takes care of.

For fans of the genre, who consume these books like potato chips, I'm sure it's a fine read. But I couldn't help but feeling I've read it all before.