The Wheel of Doll

Product Information

Ames respects the sacred formula but riffs on it with wonderful freshness. Happy Doll looks set to rank with Marlowe, Lew Archer and Travis McGee as the hero of an endlessly rereadable series of PI novels. And then the creative impulses. I have had an odd career, and it's lasted a pretty long time, thankfully. It began in 1989 with my first book [ I Pass Like Night], which was very much an homage to Hubert Selby and all sorts of different influences. I would often make things based on what I was absorbing at the time to make a living and pay the rent in New York. Writing novels never really paid the rent, of course. So I would teach at night, but then I would also perform, which would bring in some money. Or I would do journalism, and that would bring in some money. That was even how I ended up in TV, just sort of seeking to pay the rent and at the same time wanting to make things. The Adderall was really enjoying itself, had me flapping my mouth, had me feeling blithe and clever.” Doll is an ex-detective, now working at being a private investigator. An old friend looks him up and wants Doll to donate one of his kidneys to him. Doll doesn't make a decision .. mainly because his old friend shows up at his house, with a bullet in his stomach.

Doll heads to the junkie shanty towns of Washington state in search of the missing woman, getting himself involved in a series of violent confrontations that Ames handles as satisfyingly as Lee Child. The prose carries a charge without being self-conscious: the weltschmerz is pleasingly plangent; the spiralling mayhem of the plot beautifully orchestrated. What was going to happen in the fourth season, or the movie, which I think would've been fun visually, is that Jonathan [played by Jason Schwartzman] wanted to finally become a licensed detective. To become a licensed detective, you had to have been in law enforcement. So he was going to join the police academy, so we would've seen him wearing this blue outfit, training to be a cop. I don't know where I was going exactly with the Ted Danson and Zach Galifianakis characters. But I think I was going to have them become roommates because the George character [played by Danson] had lost all his money. They moved in together, and I was maybe going to have them living in Staten Island. Maybe George was going to have a podcast that was going to be called a "potcast." But this was what I was thinking however many years ago. Who knows where those characters would be now?

Customer reviews

I'd regret not asking if you had any updates on the Bored to Death front. Is there still a chance of the movie happening?

In The Wheel of Doll, Jonathan Ames immerses us once more in the world of private detective Happy Doll, introduced in Ames’s previous novel, A Man Named Doll. Our hero (and narrator) is now ‘fifty-one and missing a kidney, which made me more like sixty-one’; he also wears a hefty scar on his face, a ‘pink worm’ that makes people turn away. feeling that wonderful alchemy of the cannabis and the caffeine- you’re ready to go somewhere but don’t care too much if you make it.”

Happy Doll in book two of a presumably forward moving series, is hired by the daughter of a past flame of his. This woman, Ines, is a known junkie and most likely living on the streets. As Happy gets closer, more thugs appear and beatings commence. Not to be deterred, Happy travels up to the Pacific Northwest and through the streets of the homeless in search of Ines. The plot is not original but perhaps the character's trying to latch onto Buddhism while constantly doing some serious drugs and killing people makes him somewhat more interesting.