Reviewers, and Dead Boys’ own jacket copy, like to point out that Richard Lange’s debut short story collection is “hard-boiled.” I admit that it reminds me a little of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, specifically that opening paragraph in which the Continental Op muses on the way Personville is commonly mispronounced as Poisonville. It had seemed to him “a meaningless sort of humor” until he “went to Personville and learned better.” Both Hammett’s and Lange’s worlds are poisonous, populated with criminals, full of hard luck and grief. But the Continental Op is a player in his world, and while he might sometimes lose, it’s only in that thin margin where the odds inevitably favor the house. Lange’s characters, on the other hand, all of them first person, all of them male, weren’t even dealt a full hand, much less a full house, and most don’t even know the rules of game.

Of course, all these reviewers really mean by “hard-boiled” is that Lange’s prose is sparse, direct, tough, his portrayal of his characters desperately unsentimental. Forget that “hard-boiled” refers to people, not prose, and admit that there is a certain stylistic affinity between Lange and Hammett or Chandler or even their bastard offspring Mickey Spillane, and you’re pretty close to discovering what Dead Boys manages to do, which is continuously remind us who its characters are not.

Who they are is a group of men very much at the end of their ropes, all of them inhabitants of that city that is at once hard and soft, Los Angeles. Most have wives, children, jobs; most of the rest very recently did. I count one bank robber, and he’s gone into the business the same way others go into law, that is, praying he makes his nest egg before the job gets the better of him. The only other criminals are a shoplifter and a thoroughly rehabilitated ex-con. The narrators are, without exception, soft though they aren’t exactly comfortable with this fact.

They’re not really comfortable with their world at all, nor do they know how to effectively function in it. Some of them shut-down. Others open up in heartbreaking ways. The narrator of “Fuzzyland” is a salesman who’s just inherited the accounts of a man named Big Mike. He’s not really content with this new job, though he might figure out a way to live with it if it weren’t for the rest of his life: his sister’s been raped and quickly turning into a dope fiend, the hills surrounding his house are on fire, and he and his wife have settled into what is basically a nice friendship. Ashes fall all around him. But what does he say when all of this comes bearing down on him, when he can finally take it no more? “I want a baby,” he says—this from a narrator who has thus far come no closer to his navel than the casual comment that “I feel like all the juice has been drained out of me.”

These characters’ problem is that they can neither withdraw into themselves (they utterly lack insight, a good thing since Lange’s prose style doesn’t easily lend itself to introspection) nor function well in the external world. And yet somewhere not so far away, perhaps just down the road, perhaps only in the detective fictions of yesteryear, men did know how to function in Poisonville. Much of the collection’s tension and beauty arises from an awareness that the narrators are not hard-boiled, though they might get along better in the world if they were. For example, “Long Lost” opens with Spencer watching three past-their-prime astronauts sign autographs at the mall. Spencer has a wife, a house and a job in a cubicle he’s refused to decorate because he wants to be “ready to walk away at any time.” He’s already tried to walk away once, to run away, in fact. He made it as far as Nevada where he proceeded to get very drunk and a little beat-up. He returned to L.A. the very next day. “I had spark within me,” he says, “but not enough fuel to break the bonds of gravity.” Enter Spencer’s long lost brother, Karl. Karl’s an ex-con who’s had a little therapy. No longer so angry, he’s also not exactly soft. When Spencer tires of Karl’s intrusion into his life—an intrusion that constantly reminds Spencer of who he is not—he decides to frame Karl for shoplifting. The frame fails, and the two brothers end up fighting in the street. The fight we get from the ex-con’s point-of-view: “I gave him a shot to the head to calm his ass, and he started yelling for the cops, so I gave him another that dropped him and took off running, just left him laying on the sidewalk. Broke my heart.” Hard-boiled, indeed.

This tension between style and character may also be responsible for some of Lange’s shortcomings. The prose continuously races forward, lending itself to swift changes of circumstance and sudden, dramatic endings, but not much else. For example, “Long Lost” ends with Spencer’s wife walking out on him, after which Spencer goes through his brother’s duffel bag and puts on some of his clothes, obviously attempting to take on Karl’s identity. But the whole scene feels false, too fast, and too neat. Something else should have happened. Spencer’s wife shouldn’t have run out on him so quickly (by my estimate it took about fifteen minutes). There should have been a moment when the tide might have swung back. Spencer shouldn’t have been so fast to put on his brother’s clothes, a thoroughly revolting move he’s too smart not to feel uncomfortable making. But how can any of this happen when the style precludes both pauses and introspection?

“Dead Boys,” the title piece, ends with sentimentality. The narrator, who believes one of his co-workers may have killed himself, discovers that he hasn’t and blurts out, “You’re alive. You’re alive.” The narrative pressure that’s been building so long is released, but instead of hissing out slowly, it comes out in one big sentimental puff. “I want a baby” is also sentimental in its way, only in that story the narrator hasn’t been relieved of anything but instead crumbles at the altar of his own need. In the endings that work, what Lange’s style has repressed (the inward gaze) comes rushing to the surface. In the endings that don’t, the narrators are still telling themselves lies about the world they live in. Something’s happened, but nothing’s changed. Of course, the great thing about setting your stories in Poisonville is that the happenings are well worth your time.