Dope

The end of Dope reminds me of that time I fell off the monkeybars. I landed on my back, hard enough that the wind was knocked out of me and for a second--it seemed forever--I couldn't breathe in or out, just laid there, floundering.

But that's the finish. Dope is a book about an ex-junkie who gets asked to find a missing college dropout, a woman who happens to be a current junkie. This makes a certain kind of sense to Josephine Flannigan; besides, this is 1950s NYC, and the cops don't care much about some missing junkie girl. It doesn't hurt that her parents are offering Jo more money than she's seen in her entire life.

"'Josephine.'
Maude said my name flatly, like I was dead or she wanted me to be. I sat across from her at a booth in the show more back of the bar, where the daylight never reached and the smell of stale beer and cigarettes never cleared. Maude had been the mistress of a gangster back in the thirties and he'd bought her this bar to set her up with something after he was gone."

The narration is from Jo's point of view, and is both direct and strangely emotionally stark. As Jo traces Nadine Nelson's footsteps, she also traces her own past. It's a quick read, scarcely more than novella length, but powerful. Woven through it in Gran's straightforward prose is a demonstration of the far-reaching effects of addiction. The miracle here is that it doesn't even sound like a sermon. Other reviewers compare it to Raymond Chandler; I haven't read him in decades so I can't speak to that, but if you want to feel like you are reading a slice of history we'd rather forget, this is the book.

"I'd never been to the campus of Barnard before, and after spending the morning there I didn't plan on ever going again. The buildings looked like courthouses, and the place was so far uptown I thought I was in Boston. The closest I'd been to it before was up to 103rd Street, where a fellow I knew sold junk in a cafeteria. When the subway had stopped there I'd almost gotten off the train out of habit."

Somehow Josephine has retained--or rediscovered?-- her humanity after getting off the dope. It was kind of heartbreaking watching her maneuver through the city in search of Nadine, and listening to her dispassionate detail of who will end up where and why. You want something that will help you find some compassion for a junkie, this might be it. For me, it didn't stand up to one of my favorite books ever, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, but I can understand why this book made Gran a force to be reckoned with. show less

Josephine Flannigan, a former junkie and prostitute, is hired by a mysterious couple to find their missing daughter. Needless to say, things don’t go as planned.

Stay far, far away from this book if you need to like the characters; chances are pretty high that you won’t like most of the lowlives that appear in this well-written piece of genre fiction. But if like me, you’re all about the narrative, you should pick this one up.

The final act of this novel is surprisingly affecting, if disturbing, and stayed with me for a long time afterwards. It certainly caught me off guard -- a lovely thing in a work of fiction.

If you like your heroin lit. with a dash of noir, this is your book. Sleazy con artists, pimps, prostitutes and a pretty sister color this imaginative novel about an ex-junkie on the hunt for a missing girl. Gran’s book is like having a friend blindfold you and walk you carefully down the sidewalk before she gives you a rough spin and a push into oncoming traffic. It’s good like that.

Dope is set in 1950 in the sleazier parts of New York; its heroine, Josephine Flannigan, is an ex-junkie-whore; and its plot involves Josephine searching for a young woman who has disappeared into the New York underworld. This is my first noir and I must say I really liked it.
Despite its title, Dope is mostly about the search for the missing girl, but it is also about Joe's exploration of people from her own troubled past as she sifts through the city for clues. We meet the usual assortment of characters from New York's underbelly--madams, pushers, impostors, flophouse junkies, park-bench warmers, worn-out prostitutes, owners of bars for those with "alternative lifestyles," slick coppers, and the like.
The plot is perfectly twisted, show more keeping the reader enthralled and a bit mystified. The ugliness of the junkie scene, linked as it is to prostitution, theft, and murder, is vividly depicted. Sara Gran’s ability to bring the sad reality of addiction and its societal consequences to readers with such insight is outstanding. In only 243 pages, Gran packs a powerful tale with a far-from-perfect heroine who I ended up rooting for and wow what an ending. I will be looking for more by Gran and thank you Jude for the recommendation. show less

After reading Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead--a smart, alternative noir mystery--I was left craving for more. Dope, an earlier novel with some of the same gritty vibe, is set in the petty thieving underworld of 1950’s New York, a place that in no way resembles anything from Happy Days. Josephine, a former addict, straight for two years, is just getting by picking pockets and shoplifting jewelry when she is paid a colossal pile of cash by a distraught couple who wants her to locate their drug addicted, college drop-out daughter. Using all her former drug connections and street smarts, Josephine is closing in when she discovers she has been betrayed by someone who must know her well, but who? Dope winds around, show more filled with twists and reversals, right down to its startling culmination. show less

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Talk about minimalist writing. This book is written in the best hard-as-nails, noir style. And for that reason alone it's engaging. You can't quite tell whether you should like the protagonist too much, much the same way Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder is an enigmatic protagonist. (Goodness, don't they get bored going to bars and sitting in their rooms, smoking?)

I did figure out the denouement early on. It's very hard to write mysteries without giving away the bad guy (who seems to be a good guy), so that's not a negative assessment.

The real eyebrow raiser is the ending. I will give nothing away, except to say that I believe I've never read another ending like it.

Taken from Gillian Flynn's "favorite books list" on B&N, this seedy, meaty, riveting little histoire noir set in early 1950's NYC has made me a fan of author Sara Gran. If Gran had provided the reader with just a smidgen more emotional payoff, I would have given this rather aloof story another star, but maybe that's just the genre. I didn't feel quite invested in any of the characters, not even the heroine (not heroin), Josephine.