There's a series of children's books out there called Vampirates, but I haven't actually been able to bring myself to read any of them. I want to, oh how I want to, but I keep stopping myself because I know there's absolutely nothing that could live up to the brilliance of the title and the premise. Vampires. Pirates. Vampirates. Genius. I should have suspected something like this might apply to Tim Waggoner's Nekropolis, which has a zombie private eye for its protagonist.

Matt Richter is an ex cop, working as a PI in the City of the Dead. When a hot, blonde, leather-clad vampire approaches him for help in locating a lost artefact of great power called the Dawnstone, it's the start of a journey through Nekropolis and into Matt's past. And this, naturally, embroils them in a plot to destroy the city itself. Nekropolis (was that "k" necessary? Was it really?) is, at best, comfortably predictable. You have your stock fantastical city full of weird, dodgy, often rather repulsive denizens. You have your lost doohickey. You have your reluctant PI, your beautiful victim, and your seemingly self-contained plot that turns out to be part of something much bigger. It's a bit of Perdido Street Station, a bit of Grim Fandango, and a bit of generic hardboiled noir. It romps along at a fair pace, whisking the reader on a whistle-stop tour of Nekropolis, including brothels, libraries, spymasters, and nightclubs, and it's relatively entertaining once it gets going. There are plenty of peculiar, if obvious, little jokes (the spy master, a giant insect who controls bugs around the city, is called Gregor, for example) which add an enjoyable reference-spotting aspect to the book.

But it doesn't alter the fact that there are quite a few niggling problems with Nekropolis, mainly connected to voice and characterisation. The first person narration is unsettlingly inconsistent. At times it seems that Matt provides commentary on and interpretation of actions as they happen. At other times, Matt will specifically refer to knowledge gained through hindsight. For example, the first chapter concludes with the following line: "I was half-aware of some of the bar-goers watching me as I left, especially the blonde in leather. However, it wasn't until later I learned that as soon as I left, she got up and followed." Given that she does catch up with him in the very next chapter, this is redundant information. It seems as though the author wants to have his cake and eat it—he's decided he has to have a first person narrator, because hardboiled detective novels so often do, but he can't quite let go of the image of his main character leaving a bar, only to be followed, in a potentially sinister fashion, by one of the patrons and, therefore, clumsily attempts to jam both into the novel at once. Furthermore, the sudden switch in the way information is delivered to the reader is extremely jarring, calling undue attention to precisely how, when, and why the events of the novel are being related to us. Why does Matt choose to reveal this minor detail to us, but not major plot points? For example, when we meet the Big Bad the first time round, Matt specifically does not say: "I didn't know it at the time but this was the evil mastermind behind the plot to overthrow the city." Of course, the answer is simply that it would give the game away, but once you've set the precedent that Matt can share the benefits of hindsight you can't conveniently forget it again for the sake of narrative tension.

Waggoner's writing is filled with such bewildering misjudgements. There's this exchange between Matt and Vampire Chick:

"Where in Nekropolis did you get holy water, anyway? It's extremely illegal. If Father Dis found out—" She stopped and looked at me in horror. "The hidden light! You're a member of the Hidden Light!"

She started backing away and I held up a hand—my right one—to calm her. It was a little hard to control, thanks for Narda sizzling my arm but it still worked. "Take it easy. I'm not one of the Hidden Light, but from time to time they supply me with certain items I can't get any other way."

That didn't do much to reassure her. "They're a terrorist version of the Inquisition, Matthew: radical Christians completely dedicated to the destruction of Nekropolis and the Darkfolk by any means necessary!" (p. 85)

I do understand that she's trying to persuade Matt that dealing with the Hidden Light is a bad idea but there's no excuse for such clunky exposition, particularly when the novel is narrated in the first person.

For the most part, Waggoner's writing is functional if laboured. Take this description of Papa Chatha, voodoo-priest-by-numbers: "Papa ran long, slender black fingers through his short gray hair and then sighed," followed by, two lines later, "Papa was a dignified, handsome, black man in his sixties" (p. 23). Good heavens, Mr. Waggoner, are you trying to tell us that Papa Chatha is black? And you can almost picture the author hovering over his nouns like an over-protective mother: "Have you all got your adjective? Nobody leaves until everyone has an adjective."

Characterisation is not one of Waggoner's strong points. He does all right with broad strokes, the utterly repulsive and the cacklingly villainous, but his two central characters, Matt and Vampire Chick, are the dullest of the dull. Vampire Chick, in particular, I suspect is meant to be undergoing character development. She begins the book as a sheltered librarian vampire in a skintight leather bodysuit and ends it as someone capable of killing to protect a loved one (while still wearing a skintight leather bodysuit). But she has no actual personality. She's admiring when the narrative requires someone to admire Matt's resourcefulness, she's scared when the narrative requires Matt to be protective, she's naive when the narrative requires Matt to be cynical, and she's kick-ass when the narrative requires Matt to be rescued. And she is, of course, capable of seeing past Matt's grey, decomposing body to the beautiful and loving heart within. Or something. She does, at least, get to play slightly more of a role than the usual love/lust interest in a hardboiled detective novel, in that she's at Matt's side for most of the book, which covers a span of about 24 hours. But I never got any sense of a genuine connection between them, despite the fact they actually get disgustingly saccharine and smooshy by the final third:

"A few hours ago, I was joined to Matt soul-to-soul," Devona said. "I experienced his thoughts, his emotions . . . and his memories. I know what you did to his partner, and more, I know what that loss did to him. You should've died the day the Overmind was destroyed, you bastard. But you didn't and so I'm glad to finish the job. For Matt." She paused. "For my love."

I was so overwhelmed by what Devona had done—and even more by what she'd just said—that for a moment all I could do was sit there gaping like an undead moron. (p. 256)

This is a bit much even for me, and I happily read romance novels.

Matt, equally, is not entirely successful in terms of coming across as the hard-boiled PI he's supposed to be (even if he does have a heart of gold). In the first chapter he takes down a genetically modified lyke (to help a friend in trouble, of course) through a mixture of quick thinking and being as tough as nails. Except it's really unconvincing:

"My friend," I said, a bit too loudly, "you are the butt-ugliest sonofabitch in the city"

. . .

"I ain't your friend."

. . .

"That's true. If you were my friend, I'd suggest you have a street-surgeon remove your ass and graft it onto your face. It'd be a vast improvement." (p. 12)

Now as insults go, that's pathetic. Seriously, Mr. Richter, back to hardboiled school for you. The same thing happens again a few pages later, after Matt has had his arm torn off fighting the lyke, and encounters some wiseguys on the street:

"Hey, check it out! The guy's been disarmed!"

"I only need one arm to yank those legs off your head and shove them where Umbriel doesn't shine."

The laughter died in their throats. . . .

I genuinely have no idea why they're intimidated by this weak excuse for a threat. And if randoms on the street are more entertaining than your protagonist I think maybe something has gone wrong somewhere. Yet I'm willing to suspend my disbelief over how tough Matt Richter isn't—I imagine writing tough dialogue is difficult, after all. What I couldn't get past was his angst and constant whinging. After learning, in the second chapter, that his zombie-form might be falling apart, Matt goes on and on and on about it in an unbelievably self-pitying way:

If she couldn't get the Dawnstone back, she'd consider herself a failure to the Bloodborn, to her father, and especially to herself. I was determined to do my best to see that didn't happen, whether I kept my body from crumbling to dust or not.

She reached a hand towards my wounds but I took a step back. I didn't want her smooth, half-living hands touching my dead flesh, didn't want to see her possibly pull away in disgust. "I'm a zombie; I can't be hurt. Don't worry, Papa Chatha will just take care of it the next time I see him." Or in a couple of days I'd be gone, and a few scratches wouldn't matter anymore. (p. 65)

I'm playing the world's smallest violin here, and also wondering what it looks like if someone possibly pulls away in disgust. Is it perhaps Schrödinger's recoil?

I think the difficulty of Matt's whinging lies in the fact it seems so utterly alien to the kind of character he's supposed to be. Don't get me wrong, in similar circumstances I'd probably do a bit of wallowing myself, but I'm not supposed to be a hardboiled zombie private eye. Hardboiled heroes should most assuredly not be emo, and from its opening line ("I was sitting in Skully's, nursing a beer" [p. 7]) Nekropolis wants you to be reading it in a Philip Marlow voice. Waggoner can't sustain the register, though. Hardboiled detectives don't say things like "I bent down to retrieve [my severed arm], more than a little embarrassed" (p. 17); in fact, I found myself better able to enjoy the ride when I replaced Max Richter, Private Eye and Zombie, with Julian the Middle Class Zombie Etonian. Obviously the fact that Nekropolis has a zombie who keeps losing his limbs for its protagonist and S&M cars like the Agony DeLite on the roads indicates that it is not a book expecting to be taken seriously. But we are meant to respect Matt, and feel for his plight. He is not meant to be a wacky ineffectual hardboiled wannabe. As Waggoner is so keen to assure us, he is the kind of guy who is not afraid to deal with "radical Christians completely dedicated to the destruction of Nekropolis and the Darkfolk by any means necessary" if it will get the job done. And for all the comedic excesses of Nekropolis, we are certainly never allowed to lose sight of its dangers.

Just as Nekropolis is linguistically laboured, it's similarly emotionally and psychologically laboured. It seems as though Waggoner doesn't trust his readers to be able to see beyond the surface attitudes of his characters. First person narration always contains an element of unreliability, and hardboiled detective fiction rests upon the understanding that we are able to see beyond the detective's self-consciously tough and cynical exterior to the man of honour and integrity beneath. As soon as we are explicitly and directly told this man is good, or that he is lonely, or that he feels pain and loss, he is lessened in our eyes. The point is he bears all those things with pride. Unlike Matt, for example, who keeps on whinging.

There's even a chapter about halfway through the book where the spymaster, Gregor, exchanges information they need in return for emotional insights into how Matt feels about being a zombie. The segment is a transparent setup for Matt to be obliged, under duress, to articulate his pain, since it makes very little narrative sense for a Spymaster to trade something useful for the opportunity to play Deanna Troi with a passing zombie. Everything Matt says, and it's quite a lengthy speech, is already there in the text. It's been a while since I've read The Simple Art of Murder but I'm pretty sure it doesn't go: "He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, sensitively about his feelings, and his deep inner pain."

Perhaps it seems petty to complain that Matt isn't hardboiled enough, but if you play the card you have to use the card. Tropes are not merely aesthetics for the clueless to use as wallpaper: they become tropes for a reason, and they have meaning behind them. On balance Nekropolis is probably just about more fun than it is inept, but if it hadn't been so desperate for me to admire the hardboiledness of Matt, I'd probably have liked him—and the book—much better.

Kyra Smith is the editor of FerretBrain.