Duffy

By: Dan Kavanagh

Narrated by: Rupert Degas

Things aren't going so well for Brian McKechnie. His wife was attacked in their home, his cat was brutally killed and now a man with a suspiciously erratic accent is blackmailing him. When the police fail spectacularly at finding out who's after him, McKechnie engages the services of London's most unusual private eye.

Duffy is a detective like no other. A bisexual ex-policeman with a phobia of ticking watches and a penchant for Tupperware. But what he lacks in orthodoxy he makes up for in street-smart savvy and no-nonsense dealings. Intrigued by McKechnie's dilemma and the apparent incompetency of his ex-colleagues, Duffy heads to his old patch, the seedy underbelly of Soho, to begin inquiries of his own.

Helped by some shady characters from his past, Duffy discover that while things have changed in the years since he was working the area, the streets are still mean and the crooks walk arm in arm with the blues. Full to bursting with sex, violence and dodgy dealings, Duffy is a gripping and entertaining crime novel with a distinctly different and entirely lovable anti-hero. Read by Rupert Degas.

©1980 Dan Kavanagh (P)2014 Orion Publishing Group

silly

Under his real name, Julian Barnes, this author composes meaningful novels about love, usually love gone wrong and twisted. He spins out some police novels under the name Dan Kavanagh, and I thought I'd try one. Not very well written -- way too many long digressions that are, I suppose, meant to add color, but are simply boring. More importantly, the main character, private investigator Duffy, is unappealing, charmless, psychologically uninteresting. The reader does not care if he succeeds.