There’s something satisfying about a noir that knows exactly what it is. Daniel P. Douglas’s new novelette, the pen name of identical twins Phil and Paul Garver, Blood Tide doesn’t apologize for its cigarette smoke and rain-slicked streets, doesn’t try to subvert the hardboiled tradition. It simply executes it with precision and genuine affection for the genre’s possibilities, exploring familiar tropes with a gripping story.
Set in 1950s Los Angeles, the novel follows Jack Morrison, a former LAPD detective turned private investigator, as he digs into the suspicious death of Tom Reed, a reformist city councilman. The official story calls it robbery gone wrong, but Morrison knows better. Reed had been investigating Golden Dragon Imports, uncovering what his notebook describes as “off-white powder consistent with heroin” hidden in spice shipments through the harbor. The investigation pulls Morrison into a web that stretches from corrupt dockworkers to his former colleagues in the police force. When Wiley, a nervous dockworker, warns Morrison that “The harbor holds secrets. Deep ones. The kind that yanks people who look too close,” he’s not being melodramatic.
Beyond its central mystery, Blood Tide unfolds as a portrait of a city where every corner is compromised. Morrison moves from diners to council chambers, from fog-choked docks to hidden offices, discovering that the rot is not confined to gangsters or smugglers but runs through the police force, the political class, and even the courts. Each step forward comes at a cost: allies silenced, informants erased, and Morrison himself marked for death. It’s probably not an inspiration, but the book really reminded me especially of the L.A. Noire video game by Rockstar Games.
Douglas captures the noir atmosphere effectively and immersively. His prose moves with the measured pace of fog rolling off the harbor: “The diner’s coffee maker hissed like it was trying to warn me about something.” The dialogue crackles with tension and witticisms abound. When corrupt detective Harris tells Morrison that “Friends die all the time. Sometimes they die quicker when other friends don’t mind their own business,” and Morrison replies, “A friend of mine is dead. That makes it my business,” it feels like watching a classic movie.
Although the novellette is brief, the pacing builds steadily through investigation to violent climax. Along the way, Douglas punctuates the detective work with bursts of violence: Morrison exchanging gunfire, ducking behind oil drums as bullets chew the concrete, or a tense stakeout. Morrison himself avoids the trap of many noir protagonists who mistake cynicism for depth. The only general criticism I have for most of the book is that it’s too brief and so doesn’t give its plot room to breathe, however, this is the first book of the series apparently.
Douglas writes with the confidence of someone who has absorbed the genre’s lessons without being enslaved by them. The book reads like what might happen if Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy sat down to craft a story about institutional rot in postwar Los Angeles. It’s familiar enough to satisfy noir devotees while feeling genuinely contemporary in some ways. Yet Douglas is not simply channeling the masters—his Los Angeles is less a backdrop than a living organism, its harbors, alleys, and precinct houses functioning like veins through which power and vice circulate.
For readers who enjoy quick and readable atmospheric crime fiction (it’s only 66 pages and costs less than a cup of coffee)—whether classic Chandler, modern Michael Connelly, or anything in between, Blood Tide offers the pleasures of skilled genre fiction: sharp dialogue, vivid atmosphere, and moral questions that linger after the last page. As Morrison notes with characteristic resignation, “Some questions needed to be asked, even if you already knew you wouldn’t like the answers.” The harbor may keep its secrets, but Douglas has crafted one worth sharing.
You can get your copy of “Blood Tide” here!
