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Dope
Entering the 1950s in the hopes that she has left her violent and drug-addicted past behind her, Josephine Flannigan takes a job helping a couple to find their missing daughter, a Barnard student who has disappeared into the subculture of heroin addiction; an assignment that forces Josephine to make a life-altering choice. By the author of Come Closer. 30,000 first printing.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published February 2, 2006
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About the author
Sara Gran
16 books2,013 followersSara Gran's most recent book is LITTLE MYSTERIES, available from Dreamland Books on 2/11/25. She is the author of 7 1/2 previous novels, a screenwriter, and a publisher.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 366 reviews
June 21, 2021
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 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.
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 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.
January 27, 2019
In the book “Dope” by Sara Gran, Gran's heroine, Josephine 'Joe' Flannigan, is a former heroin addict (dope fiend) and hooker (whore, Gran’s words) who has recast herself as a petty thief and con-woman.
Gran places the story in 1950’s Manhattan and our ex-dope fiend is offered a $2,000 proposition from a wealthy Westchester couple looking for their gone astray daughter, and ‘Joe’ thinks she has the where-with all to find her.
I wanted to rate this novel higher. However, Gran went astray by spinning ‘Joe’s’ story with a Walt Disney influence of her being the clichéd hooker-with-a-heart. To my way of thinking, as the novel progressed Gran became preachy with her stance ‘of the evils of the 50’s “Dope” culture’ permeating the city and corrupting the population.
It’s easy to see Gran was attempting to create a Noir story. However the novel turned out to be surprisingly bland by Noir standards. The setting and characters never rise above the generic, and the often utilized in such stories (and I love this genre). Gran makes the narrative occasionally seem a little too polished to be the product of a reformed junkie with a ninth-grade education.
Hopefully Ms. Gran used this book as a learning tool and received some honest feedback as her next book, the first of the “Claire DeWitt” books, is certainly a bit more honest.
This hardcover is signed by Sara Gran.
Gran places the story in 1950’s Manhattan and our ex-dope fiend is offered a $2,000 proposition from a wealthy Westchester couple looking for their gone astray daughter, and ‘Joe’ thinks she has the where-with all to find her.
I wanted to rate this novel higher. However, Gran went astray by spinning ‘Joe’s’ story with a Walt Disney influence of her being the clichéd hooker-with-a-heart. To my way of thinking, as the novel progressed Gran became preachy with her stance ‘of the evils of the 50’s “Dope” culture’ permeating the city and corrupting the population.
It’s easy to see Gran was attempting to create a Noir story. However the novel turned out to be surprisingly bland by Noir standards. The setting and characters never rise above the generic, and the often utilized in such stories (and I love this genre). Gran makes the narrative occasionally seem a little too polished to be the product of a reformed junkie with a ninth-grade education.
Hopefully Ms. Gran used this book as a learning tool and received some honest feedback as her next book, the first of the “Claire DeWitt” books, is certainly a bit more honest.
This hardcover is signed by Sara Gran.
January 28, 2022
My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. I’m avoiding police procedurals and standalone “women in peril'' thrillers to focus on ladies who are amateur sleuths. Dope is Sara Gran's third novel, a hardboiled New York private detective story which could be considered a dry run to her lengthier and more polished Claire DeWitt mysteries. Published in 2006, this stands out by featuring a female protagonist in 1950. It often appears to be an experiment in whether Gran could write something that felt it was written in 1950, with few modern conveniences or awareness of how spare it is.
The novel is the first person account of Josephine Flannigan, a thirty-six-year-old recovering junkie who makes ends meet by shoplifting at department stores. She's summoned by a real estate investor and his wife to find their nineteen-year-old daughter Nadine Nelson, who dropped out of Barnard to pursue her heroin habit full-time. "Joe" comes recommended by someone named Nick the Greek (Joe knows several men by that name) as being intimately familiar with that world. The Nelsons offer her $1,000 for expenses and promise another $1,000 when she finds their daughter.
After speaking to Nadine's former resident advisor and her roommate, Joe scours the taxi dance halls, strip clubs and flophouses thick with her old dope-shooting crowd. The closest she has to a friend is Jim Cohen, a confidence man who lives well and offers Joe use of his Oldsmobile Rocket 88. They run into her younger sister Shelley, a model-actress whose career Joe follows in the papers but who wants very little to do with her junkie sister or her fleabag pals. Joe also reunites with her husband, a dope friend named Monte who hangs out at Bryant Park between fixes.
I watched him for a while before he saw me, and a funny thing happened. I didn't see an old junkie in a worn-out suit anymore. Instead I saw a man ten years younger and forty pounds heavier, and the forty extra pounds were all muscle. His suit was spotless, like it always was, pressed just that morning, with a fresh white handkerchief in his breast pocket. Thick blond hair fell into his eyes no matter how much he combed it back because he couldn't sit still, he was always up and doing something, even if it was just straightening out a stack of papers or tapping his fingers on the table, working out his new plan.
And there was always a plan, a new one every few weeks. At first the plans were always how we would make some money and get out of Hell's Kitchen. Monte was going to get a job in a factory somewhere, or a job in sales; sales was a good deal because the harder you worked, the more money you could make. He knew a fellow who worked in a Cadillac dealership in New Jersey, and Monte was sure that if the fellow got him a job he could be taking home a hundred dollars a week.
Then the plans were about getting money for dope. One big score, because he couldn't hold down a regular job anymore. There was a house on Eighty-second and Park that was just ripe for the picking. Old couple, rich as sin, and they always left the window open at night. The only problem was figuring out how to make it up to the third floor without anyone noticing. Or he was going to pull off a job with some boys from the neighborhood. It would be easy, all they had to do was get the bagman alone and the money was as good as theirs. A thousand dollars, at least..
Soon the plans were all about kicking. The big plan was always tomorrow, or next week. The plan was never for today. You mixed the dope with half water, shot it that way, and slowly increased the water until you were shooting plain water every day, and you'd never feel any pain at all. Or the plan was that Monte would go to Lexington, Kentucky, where there was a hospital that would give you a cure that'd make you never want to touch dope again. Next week, maybe. Or the week after.
The best thing I can say about Dope is that Sara Gran tried to write a mystery as if she were a paid-by-the-word pulp fiction writer in 1949 cranking out a book, perhaps one serialized in All Detective or Dime Mystery. It's short, it's plain and it seems largely based on other stories she read in the pulps. There's no indication Gran used the Internet to flesh out the New York underworld of 1950, no inclination to dig deeper into her material. Other characters are just names. There's a lot of repetition, as if working on a story longer than a week bore heavy on her. The writing is okay, but never grabbed me.
I bought a map at a gas station to find my way to New Village. When I was close by I used a phone book in a drugstore to find the Nelsons' house. I had heard of places like New Village before, but never seen anything like it. Block after block of houses, all exactly the same, like they all sprang up together out of the blue one day. A new car in every driveway. Every house had a little lawn out front, and every blade of grass on each lawn was trimmed down to the exact same height. Some of the ladies had flower beds and even the flowers all looked alike, something small and pink. There wasn't a person out on the streets, which made sense seeing as there were no sidewalks--the lawns came all the way out to the road. It gave me the creeps.
A lot of historical fiction I've read is written as if the author were a time traveler, using modern technology to tell a story about the past. Gran resists any temptation to color or provide context to her setting like a contemporary author might. My major obstacle with Dope is how Gran exposes her recovering addict protagonist to alcohol, drugs and old running mates who are actually shooting up in her presence, and she handles that fine. And they're all nice junkies. No one tries to get Joe hooked again. That is a very naïve take, something I'd expect from a writer in 1950 but not a good one with our current day awareness of addiction.
While reading, I imagined Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Josephine Flannigan. The first mention of "fleabag" brought her to mind.
The novel is the first person account of Josephine Flannigan, a thirty-six-year-old recovering junkie who makes ends meet by shoplifting at department stores. She's summoned by a real estate investor and his wife to find their nineteen-year-old daughter Nadine Nelson, who dropped out of Barnard to pursue her heroin habit full-time. "Joe" comes recommended by someone named Nick the Greek (Joe knows several men by that name) as being intimately familiar with that world. The Nelsons offer her $1,000 for expenses and promise another $1,000 when she finds their daughter.
After speaking to Nadine's former resident advisor and her roommate, Joe scours the taxi dance halls, strip clubs and flophouses thick with her old dope-shooting crowd. The closest she has to a friend is Jim Cohen, a confidence man who lives well and offers Joe use of his Oldsmobile Rocket 88. They run into her younger sister Shelley, a model-actress whose career Joe follows in the papers but who wants very little to do with her junkie sister or her fleabag pals. Joe also reunites with her husband, a dope friend named Monte who hangs out at Bryant Park between fixes.
I watched him for a while before he saw me, and a funny thing happened. I didn't see an old junkie in a worn-out suit anymore. Instead I saw a man ten years younger and forty pounds heavier, and the forty extra pounds were all muscle. His suit was spotless, like it always was, pressed just that morning, with a fresh white handkerchief in his breast pocket. Thick blond hair fell into his eyes no matter how much he combed it back because he couldn't sit still, he was always up and doing something, even if it was just straightening out a stack of papers or tapping his fingers on the table, working out his new plan.
And there was always a plan, a new one every few weeks. At first the plans were always how we would make some money and get out of Hell's Kitchen. Monte was going to get a job in a factory somewhere, or a job in sales; sales was a good deal because the harder you worked, the more money you could make. He knew a fellow who worked in a Cadillac dealership in New Jersey, and Monte was sure that if the fellow got him a job he could be taking home a hundred dollars a week.
Then the plans were about getting money for dope. One big score, because he couldn't hold down a regular job anymore. There was a house on Eighty-second and Park that was just ripe for the picking. Old couple, rich as sin, and they always left the window open at night. The only problem was figuring out how to make it up to the third floor without anyone noticing. Or he was going to pull off a job with some boys from the neighborhood. It would be easy, all they had to do was get the bagman alone and the money was as good as theirs. A thousand dollars, at least..
Soon the plans were all about kicking. The big plan was always tomorrow, or next week. The plan was never for today. You mixed the dope with half water, shot it that way, and slowly increased the water until you were shooting plain water every day, and you'd never feel any pain at all. Or the plan was that Monte would go to Lexington, Kentucky, where there was a hospital that would give you a cure that'd make you never want to touch dope again. Next week, maybe. Or the week after.
The best thing I can say about Dope is that Sara Gran tried to write a mystery as if she were a paid-by-the-word pulp fiction writer in 1949 cranking out a book, perhaps one serialized in All Detective or Dime Mystery. It's short, it's plain and it seems largely based on other stories she read in the pulps. There's no indication Gran used the Internet to flesh out the New York underworld of 1950, no inclination to dig deeper into her material. Other characters are just names. There's a lot of repetition, as if working on a story longer than a week bore heavy on her. The writing is okay, but never grabbed me.
I bought a map at a gas station to find my way to New Village. When I was close by I used a phone book in a drugstore to find the Nelsons' house. I had heard of places like New Village before, but never seen anything like it. Block after block of houses, all exactly the same, like they all sprang up together out of the blue one day. A new car in every driveway. Every house had a little lawn out front, and every blade of grass on each lawn was trimmed down to the exact same height. Some of the ladies had flower beds and even the flowers all looked alike, something small and pink. There wasn't a person out on the streets, which made sense seeing as there were no sidewalks--the lawns came all the way out to the road. It gave me the creeps.
A lot of historical fiction I've read is written as if the author were a time traveler, using modern technology to tell a story about the past. Gran resists any temptation to color or provide context to her setting like a contemporary author might. My major obstacle with Dope is how Gran exposes her recovering addict protagonist to alcohol, drugs and old running mates who are actually shooting up in her presence, and she handles that fine. And they're all nice junkies. No one tries to get Joe hooked again. That is a very naïve take, something I'd expect from a writer in 1950 but not a good one with our current day awareness of addiction.
While reading, I imagined Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Josephine Flannigan. The first mention of "fleabag" brought her to mind.
August 9, 2017
⭐️⭐️1/2
The thing is, author Sara Gran really creeped me out with her previous demonic possession novel, Come Closer, impressing me with her matter-of-fact, conversational prose. So I really wanted to read more of Gran's work. But Dope doesn't offer much more than most of the other usual crime mysteries. It really is mostly just about ex-dopefiend Josephine Flannigan stalking around Manhattan searching for a missing girl. Gran does give us a bit more with her exploration of Josephine's past and her fight to stay on the wagon. Other than that it was all pretty forgettable. There's nothing inherently terrible about Dope, I just found it unremarkable. But hey, it might just be me and the way my taste has been changing.
Sometimes, if you've been unlucky enough to find out the truth, you're better off forgetting it. Especially when there's not much you can do with it.For a while now, I've been pretty over reading standard detective mysteries. I've begun to find them terribly boring, mostly featuring a slightly flawed investigator running around asking the same questions for most of the book; it gets pretty tedious and repetitive after a while. These days, I'm more interested in dark crime and noir stories that are a little more creative and substantial. So I'm not sure why I expected something different when I cracked this open.
The thing is, author Sara Gran really creeped me out with her previous demonic possession novel, Come Closer, impressing me with her matter-of-fact, conversational prose. So I really wanted to read more of Gran's work. But Dope doesn't offer much more than most of the other usual crime mysteries. It really is mostly just about ex-dopefiend Josephine Flannigan stalking around Manhattan searching for a missing girl. Gran does give us a bit more with her exploration of Josephine's past and her fight to stay on the wagon. Other than that it was all pretty forgettable. There's nothing inherently terrible about Dope, I just found it unremarkable. But hey, it might just be me and the way my taste has been changing.
December 15, 2019
"Frankly, Miss Flannigan, all I know about you is that you live in New York City, you're . . . that you're in the same line of work as [con man Nick 'The Greek'] Paganas, and that you used to be a drug addict. But for now, you're our only hope." -- 'Mr. Nelson,' on page 16 in chapter 2
I first became aware of author Sara Gran via her unique series featuring private investigator Claire DeWitt at the beginning of this calendar year. I quickly devoured the (thus far) three DeWitt books, and I then - as I am wont to do with a new 'favorite' author -searched for any other works by Gran.
Dope was Gran's sophomore effort from 2006. It's a bleakly gritty and hardboiled little crime story set way back in the New York City of the early 50's. Protagonist Josephine 'Joe' Flannigan is a petty thief / shoplifter, a thirtysomething divorced ex-addict who appears to have successfully kicked a decade-long heroin habit, and now keeps a quiet lifestyle in Manhattan amidst other junkies and low-level criminal types. Then, out of the blue, she is hired by a respectable-looking suburban couple to locate / retrieve their missing college-age daughter, who has spiraled into drugs and prostitution.
Although it takes several chapters to initially pick up steam, unlikely amateur sleuth Flanging works the investigation - as she receives $1,000 up front, with the promise of another $1,000 later - using her streetwise knowledge and contacts with 'the usual suspects' (addicts, working girls, dancers, con men, desk clerks, cops) to find the missing young lady. By the final 50 or so pages it ramps up to get pleasingly twisty like any good noir drama, and concludes on an appropriately dark and cynical note.
I first became aware of author Sara Gran via her unique series featuring private investigator Claire DeWitt at the beginning of this calendar year. I quickly devoured the (thus far) three DeWitt books, and I then - as I am wont to do with a new 'favorite' author -searched for any other works by Gran.
Dope was Gran's sophomore effort from 2006. It's a bleakly gritty and hardboiled little crime story set way back in the New York City of the early 50's. Protagonist Josephine 'Joe' Flannigan is a petty thief / shoplifter, a thirtysomething divorced ex-addict who appears to have successfully kicked a decade-long heroin habit, and now keeps a quiet lifestyle in Manhattan amidst other junkies and low-level criminal types. Then, out of the blue, she is hired by a respectable-looking suburban couple to locate / retrieve their missing college-age daughter, who has spiraled into drugs and prostitution.
Although it takes several chapters to initially pick up steam, unlikely amateur sleuth Flanging works the investigation - as she receives $1,000 up front, with the promise of another $1,000 later - using her streetwise knowledge and contacts with 'the usual suspects' (addicts, working girls, dancers, con men, desk clerks, cops) to find the missing young lady. By the final 50 or so pages it ramps up to get pleasingly twisty like any good noir drama, and concludes on an appropriately dark and cynical note.
December 26, 2021
Not a life-altering book by any means, but interesting enough up until an ending that I considered forced and implausible.
In most of the noir novels I've read, you get a lot of tough guys inflicting damage on each other, flinging jibbering weenies down the stairs and alternately relieving their stresses in the arms of their needy girlfriend and local prostitute. This book tells the tale from the point of view of the prostitute, and provides a convincingly grimy view of the lives of female smack addicts in 1950's Manhattan.
I read a lot of medical memoirs written by doctors who have taken care of such people, and the amount of overlap between the medical opinions of such a lifestyle and author Gran's is impressive. The message is: Go to school. Get that degree. The worst day working in a CPA's office is a million times better than the best day of being a woman trading sex for drugs.
I don't know how Gran became an expert on the atmospherics of Manhattan just after WWII, but it keeps the book moving. The characters are rather one-dimensional and, of course, the books ending was a letdown. But it was an interesting look at a world I haven't seen before.
In most of the noir novels I've read, you get a lot of tough guys inflicting damage on each other, flinging jibbering weenies down the stairs and alternately relieving their stresses in the arms of their needy girlfriend and local prostitute. This book tells the tale from the point of view of the prostitute, and provides a convincingly grimy view of the lives of female smack addicts in 1950's Manhattan.
I read a lot of medical memoirs written by doctors who have taken care of such people, and the amount of overlap between the medical opinions of such a lifestyle and author Gran's is impressive. The message is: Go to school. Get that degree. The worst day working in a CPA's office is a million times better than the best day of being a woman trading sex for drugs.
I don't know how Gran became an expert on the atmospherics of Manhattan just after WWII, but it keeps the book moving. The characters are rather one-dimensional and, of course, the books ending was a letdown. But it was an interesting look at a world I haven't seen before.
November 20, 2014
Original 2011 review Sara Gran, where have you been all my life? Or more specifically, the last two weeks, when I couldn't find anything to read that inspired more than a 'meh'? This book is superb. The writing is sharp, crisp, fresh, bracing, a punch in the jaw. I finished this in roughly two hours on Sunday night & I am still thinking about Joey and the raw old hand she got dealt. Magnificent.
2014 re-reading review I'm doing a Sara Gran re-read leading up to Halloween because I don't have enough on my to-read table as it is - yeah right. Some authors are just worth the time it takes to revisit their work, and this is just as damnably exquisite as I remembered. The only thing that's changed is me; I've now read quite a bit more 50s noir & I can see even more clearly how well Gran can hang alongside the big boys & girls of the genre. Every word in this is perfect, nothing wasted & nothing out of place. This book is still a punch in the jaw - but a beautiful one! - and the ending is just as heartbreaking & spectacular as it was the first time.
2014 re-reading review I'm doing a Sara Gran re-read leading up to Halloween because I don't have enough on my to-read table as it is - yeah right. Some authors are just worth the time it takes to revisit their work, and this is just as damnably exquisite as I remembered. The only thing that's changed is me; I've now read quite a bit more 50s noir & I can see even more clearly how well Gran can hang alongside the big boys & girls of the genre. Every word in this is perfect, nothing wasted & nothing out of place. This book is still a punch in the jaw - but a beautiful one! - and the ending is just as heartbreaking & spectacular as it was the first time.
June 26, 2025
New York in 1950. A woman named Josephine, current pickpocket and former heroin addict, is sought to search for a couple’s junkie daughter. She investigates, but everything is not what it seems.
August 23, 2012
Sure as shit ain't like Pleasantville around these parts.
Sara Gran's look at the seedy flipside of 1950's America is a fantastic slice of noir that calls to mind greats like James M. Cain and early Lawrence Block. Joesephine Flannigan is paid to find a college girl slumming it as a dope fiend and using the contacts she built up through a lifetime of stealing and whoring and scoring dope gets hooked on solving a mystery much darker than she ever anticipated. This is everything the good clean housewives of the suburbs were worried about whilst wearing those fake smiles and baking their grandmothers apple pie on American sitcoms of the period.
This type of novel relies on a few key ingredients and Dope has them all lined up nicely. The protagonist is a well rounded and believable character, the mileau she moves through is painted in just the right tones of shadowy black and sickly grey and a seemingly obvious plot with some twists thrown in to keep you guessing.
I was 10 pags in when Leah demanded I take her out for breakfast, that's when I knew I was hooked on this one. The combination of first person semi-detached existenialist tone, minimalist noir writing and the situation combining to keep me flipping through, enjoying myself immensely. There's a slight dip part way through, my mind wandering as the pace slows but that was soon rectified.
If you haven't tried Sara Gran yet I believe this is a good place to start.
Sara Gran's look at the seedy flipside of 1950's America is a fantastic slice of noir that calls to mind greats like James M. Cain and early Lawrence Block. Joesephine Flannigan is paid to find a college girl slumming it as a dope fiend and using the contacts she built up through a lifetime of stealing and whoring and scoring dope gets hooked on solving a mystery much darker than she ever anticipated. This is everything the good clean housewives of the suburbs were worried about whilst wearing those fake smiles and baking their grandmothers apple pie on American sitcoms of the period.
This type of novel relies on a few key ingredients and Dope has them all lined up nicely. The protagonist is a well rounded and believable character, the mileau she moves through is painted in just the right tones of shadowy black and sickly grey and a seemingly obvious plot with some twists thrown in to keep you guessing.
"I never met an addict who came from a nice home . I've met addicts that came from families that had money and nice houses . But never from a nice home."
I was 10 pags in when Leah demanded I take her out for breakfast, that's when I knew I was hooked on this one. The combination of first person semi-detached existenialist tone, minimalist noir writing and the situation combining to keep me flipping through, enjoying myself immensely. There's a slight dip part way through, my mind wandering as the pace slows but that was soon rectified.
If you haven't tried Sara Gran yet I believe this is a good place to start.
March 5, 2009
This is probably the finest piece of American noir I've come across.
March 6, 2013
I couldn't put this book down. Sara Gran writes a great noir mystery with none of the usual male BS. Instead, like City of the Dead, she burrows into the underbelly of a city (this time 1950s New York), and portrays each character with a clear-eyed humanizing portrait. Not that it makes them likable characters, necessarily, but understandable and real.
Her dialogue is sharp and her handling of situations is equally sharp. While I would never use adjectives like "elegiac" "lush" or "evocative" (whatever the usual adjectives reviewers like to use about most literary fiction written by women), instead, "refreshing" "gritty" "realistic" "shocking" are the words I would use.
If you'd like a good read for a few hours, I highly recommend this one (and City of the Dead is even better).
Her dialogue is sharp and her handling of situations is equally sharp. While I would never use adjectives like "elegiac" "lush" or "evocative" (whatever the usual adjectives reviewers like to use about most literary fiction written by women), instead, "refreshing" "gritty" "realistic" "shocking" are the words I would use.
If you'd like a good read for a few hours, I highly recommend this one (and City of the Dead is even better).
July 9, 2018
I bought this book because Kent Gowran posted its striking cover awhile back. Gran writes with force and style, crafting a tale that becomes increasingly complex. The main character, Joe, is an instantly likable lowlife trapped in a bleak world that despite her best efforts proves difficult for her to escape. This is a period piece with plenty of Ray Chandler vibe that somehow also feels modern.
March 9, 2016
The best stories are the kind that linger in your mind long after you've finished them. For me, DOPE by Sara Gran was that kind of story.
Josephine "Joe" Flannigan is just the girl next door--if you happen to live in Hell's Kitchen, that is. Joe grew up there under the not-so-watchful eye of a single mother, so it was up to Joe to look after herself and her kid sister, Shelley. Both girls end up falling in with the wrong crowd and getting addicted to heroin, but pulling themselves out of "the life" in very different ways. When the story begins, it's 1950 and Joe is making a living picking pockets and "boosting" (to use the parlance of that time) jewelry and other valuables from stores. Shelley has become a successful model and aspiring actress.
When a suburban couple hires Joe to find their wayward daughter in the streets from which she came, it looks like easy money. But the investigation turns out to be a lot more complicated than she expects. And the further Joe delves into the matter, the more trouble she unwittingly creates for herself.
Read entire review at http://thebookgrrl.blogspot.com/2008/...
Josephine "Joe" Flannigan is just the girl next door--if you happen to live in Hell's Kitchen, that is. Joe grew up there under the not-so-watchful eye of a single mother, so it was up to Joe to look after herself and her kid sister, Shelley. Both girls end up falling in with the wrong crowd and getting addicted to heroin, but pulling themselves out of "the life" in very different ways. When the story begins, it's 1950 and Joe is making a living picking pockets and "boosting" (to use the parlance of that time) jewelry and other valuables from stores. Shelley has become a successful model and aspiring actress.
When a suburban couple hires Joe to find their wayward daughter in the streets from which she came, it looks like easy money. But the investigation turns out to be a lot more complicated than she expects. And the further Joe delves into the matter, the more trouble she unwittingly creates for herself.
Read entire review at http://thebookgrrl.blogspot.com/2008/...
November 4, 2008
Small in stature... big on story!
A reformed "junkie" goes off the grift for a legit job of finding a missing girl and is thrown into a world (Hell's Kitchen 1950s) she had been trying to avoid in order to stay clean. I had trouble feeling very sympathetic to her situation until the plot started twisting and the tables were turning. Good storytelling!
Thanks again Bethany!
A reformed "junkie" goes off the grift for a legit job of finding a missing girl and is thrown into a world (Hell's Kitchen 1950s) she had been trying to avoid in order to stay clean. I had trouble feeling very sympathetic to her situation until the plot started twisting and the tables were turning. Good storytelling!
Thanks again Bethany!
June 17, 2012
DOPE is a an admirably solid and capable noir thriller. The novel is fairly literate, which I appreciate, but like many "highbrow" novels it somehow feels like it's distancing itself from its source material, which in this case it borrows from most thoroughly (especially Chandler and Cain). DOPE a fast and fun read (well, maybe not "fun"--parts are bleak and harrowing), and the conceit is an effective one: moving classic noir settings up a decade into 1950's, where the novel, since it is written in the early 21st century, is at once a period piece but can also deal with sex and drug subcultures in a much more frank way than anything written in the mid-20th century ever could have. Certain scenes set in NYC are incredibly effective, especially dance halls, automats, and dreary whorehouses and shooting parlors. Other scenes, especially one set in an upper class home in Westchester, felt very clunky. I liked DOPE, but not as much as I hoped I would based on the many rave reviews. That fact suggests, again, that I probably prefer my literature very highbrow or very lowbrow, whereas the mixing of the two, even in capable hands, doesn't always work for me.
October 3, 2011
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, filled with twists and reversals, right down to its startling culmination.
May 8, 2015
Meine Rezension findet ihr hier :) http://dasblondinchen.blogspot.de/201...
July 7, 2013
1950s, New York City, light ages before the famous ‘no tolerance’ policy of Mayor Giuliani. Josephine Flannigan, 36, tries to make her living as a former heroin addict. She is a skilled con artist, a shrewd shoplifter and, generally, whatever anybody wants her to be providing they pay cash. She doesn’t do drugs and she doesn’t sell herself, anything else is negotiable. She must be clever and flexible - in such a seedy, dangerous, crime-ridden city she is lucky she’s survived to her third decade at all. As she hasn’t been shooting up for two years she looks ‘great’, with shiny hair, clearer complexion and a more rounded figure. Still paying her rent every single month is a challenge – she has no education and no steady position so money is tight; occasional odd jobs (like stealing a ring at Tiffany for breakfast ;p ) are hardly very profitable, fences never pay you much. The competition is too fierce.
Fortunately one of her ‘friends’ recommends Joe’s skills to the Nelsons, a respectable suburban couple. Their eighteen-year old daughter, Nadine, has abruptly disappeared with a wrong kind of boyfriend. Josephine recognized him instantly with a shudder as a ruthless pimp and a drug dealer called Jerry McFall. As Nadine has been a drug fiend for some time now (that’s why she dropped out of Barnard College) it seems Joey is the best person to find her, far better than any police officer of a PI – after all she knows that milieu like the back of her hand. What’s more the anxious parents offer her $1,000 upfront and then another thousand if she brings Nadine home in one piece. A sweet deal and easy buck? Not really.
Josephine embarks on an odyssey through New York’s underworld which is a bit like a sentimental but a very dangerous journey to her – she reconnects with many of her old friends and must constantly fight off the temptation to return to drugs. After a while she starts to care about the absent girl in spite of herself, maybe because the girl is as vulnerable as herself and maybe because Joe misses her younger sister, Shelley. Shelley, now a popular ads model and a budding actress, managed to make a stunning career considering her background, mainly because of Joe’s devotion and support; however, she doesn’t need the older sister anymore and she is even ashamed of her. Let’s face it, she aspires to be upper class and a former prostitute and drug addict of a sister not exactly helps that image. Business is business.
Will Josephine be able to find Nadine on time to prevent the worst? Will the money be worth her efforts? Or maybe it is not such a great chance at all and somebody is simply framing her for murder? You know that old saying: if something looks or sounds too good it is most likely too good to be true…
What I liked:
There is nothing romanticized about the story you get in this novel and its heroine, mauled by her sad experience. The slums are not just providing a colourful background – they are described with gritty vividness, really the worst places to visit, full of brutal, despairing, desolate people who see no end of their problems and have no future. Josephine is not a princess who managed to come unscathed from hell, quite the opposite in fact; as the narrator she honestly admits from the beginning that she has been leading horrible life since her childhood with alcoholic, unstable mother and a younger sister to feed and protect from the worst.
Raised rough in Hell’s Kitchen, Josephine never expected much from life. She has scraped by, pulling small cons, shoplifting, whoring when times were particularly bad— then doing just about anything to get enough for her next fix. Still she never feels sorry for herself and the way she treats her sister, now apparently doing much better than poor Joe has ever done, is very touching. Almost as touching as Joe’s heroic efforts to find a rich brat from a ‘good’ house even when she becomes pretty sure nobody really cares what’s happened to Nadine. Making Josephine persevere the author showed that her heroine really deserved better than being labeled white trash, somebody not even her glamorous sister wants to recognize on the street. It is even more impressing that at first Joe admits her annoyance at Nadine, a girl who had every advantage like a loving family and money, and managed to screw up her life royally just for fun. She says chillingly:
“She wanted her walk on the wild side and now she was getting it. So let her see what The Life was like. Let her lose her looks from getting hit in the face too many times . Let her lose a few teeth and all of her pride and all her charm school manners. Her college education wouldn't do her any good out here.”
It really takes a lot of backbone and character integrity to keep looking for and helping somebody you’ve envied so much; such qualities made Joey a compelling character and it was really shown, not told.
Now about the style. Sara Gran writes with a lot of reserve which only adds force to her narration. There are no infodumps or boring fragments in this novel – with every new person Josephine encounters on her path there is the promise of a whole new interesting story just waiting to be told to a willing listener. There are no redundant secondary characters either.
The baddie is really bad – a female boxer and a pimp plus a crooked drug dealer, is there anything better for your negative character…I mean anything worse? There is another baddie, as ugly as Jerry but I can say no more, it would be a major spoiler.
What I didn’t like:
The ending. I wanted a HEA for Josephine very badly but, unfortunately, the author decided otherwise – she suggested a much more real but pretty painful outcome. Still a suggestion is not a fact, right? I would love to read a sequel in which Joey has a bit more luck and finds her much-deserved stability, maybe even happiness.
Final verdict:
One of better noir mystery novels I’ve read this year with a funny, intelligent heroine and interesting settings. Still it is definitely not a novel for somebody who likes happy endings – be warned, the final several pages are pretty heart-rending in a dark, brutal way.
Fortunately one of her ‘friends’ recommends Joe’s skills to the Nelsons, a respectable suburban couple. Their eighteen-year old daughter, Nadine, has abruptly disappeared with a wrong kind of boyfriend. Josephine recognized him instantly with a shudder as a ruthless pimp and a drug dealer called Jerry McFall. As Nadine has been a drug fiend for some time now (that’s why she dropped out of Barnard College) it seems Joey is the best person to find her, far better than any police officer of a PI – after all she knows that milieu like the back of her hand. What’s more the anxious parents offer her $1,000 upfront and then another thousand if she brings Nadine home in one piece. A sweet deal and easy buck? Not really.
Josephine embarks on an odyssey through New York’s underworld which is a bit like a sentimental but a very dangerous journey to her – she reconnects with many of her old friends and must constantly fight off the temptation to return to drugs. After a while she starts to care about the absent girl in spite of herself, maybe because the girl is as vulnerable as herself and maybe because Joe misses her younger sister, Shelley. Shelley, now a popular ads model and a budding actress, managed to make a stunning career considering her background, mainly because of Joe’s devotion and support; however, she doesn’t need the older sister anymore and she is even ashamed of her. Let’s face it, she aspires to be upper class and a former prostitute and drug addict of a sister not exactly helps that image. Business is business.
Will Josephine be able to find Nadine on time to prevent the worst? Will the money be worth her efforts? Or maybe it is not such a great chance at all and somebody is simply framing her for murder? You know that old saying: if something looks or sounds too good it is most likely too good to be true…
What I liked:
There is nothing romanticized about the story you get in this novel and its heroine, mauled by her sad experience. The slums are not just providing a colourful background – they are described with gritty vividness, really the worst places to visit, full of brutal, despairing, desolate people who see no end of their problems and have no future. Josephine is not a princess who managed to come unscathed from hell, quite the opposite in fact; as the narrator she honestly admits from the beginning that she has been leading horrible life since her childhood with alcoholic, unstable mother and a younger sister to feed and protect from the worst.
Raised rough in Hell’s Kitchen, Josephine never expected much from life. She has scraped by, pulling small cons, shoplifting, whoring when times were particularly bad— then doing just about anything to get enough for her next fix. Still she never feels sorry for herself and the way she treats her sister, now apparently doing much better than poor Joe has ever done, is very touching. Almost as touching as Joe’s heroic efforts to find a rich brat from a ‘good’ house even when she becomes pretty sure nobody really cares what’s happened to Nadine. Making Josephine persevere the author showed that her heroine really deserved better than being labeled white trash, somebody not even her glamorous sister wants to recognize on the street. It is even more impressing that at first Joe admits her annoyance at Nadine, a girl who had every advantage like a loving family and money, and managed to screw up her life royally just for fun. She says chillingly:
“She wanted her walk on the wild side and now she was getting it. So let her see what The Life was like. Let her lose her looks from getting hit in the face too many times . Let her lose a few teeth and all of her pride and all her charm school manners. Her college education wouldn't do her any good out here.”
It really takes a lot of backbone and character integrity to keep looking for and helping somebody you’ve envied so much; such qualities made Joey a compelling character and it was really shown, not told.
Now about the style. Sara Gran writes with a lot of reserve which only adds force to her narration. There are no infodumps or boring fragments in this novel – with every new person Josephine encounters on her path there is the promise of a whole new interesting story just waiting to be told to a willing listener. There are no redundant secondary characters either.
The baddie is really bad – a female boxer and a pimp plus a crooked drug dealer, is there anything better for your negative character…I mean anything worse? There is another baddie, as ugly as Jerry but I can say no more, it would be a major spoiler.
What I didn’t like:
The ending. I wanted a HEA for Josephine very badly but, unfortunately, the author decided otherwise – she suggested a much more real but pretty painful outcome. Still a suggestion is not a fact, right? I would love to read a sequel in which Joey has a bit more luck and finds her much-deserved stability, maybe even happiness.
Final verdict:
One of better noir mystery novels I’ve read this year with a funny, intelligent heroine and interesting settings. Still it is definitely not a novel for somebody who likes happy endings – be warned, the final several pages are pretty heart-rending in a dark, brutal way.
July 20, 2018
i feel like the 5 stars is a bit much maybe, but this one really hit me... hard... i read "Come Closer" years ago so had forgotten or never absorbed Gran's style... everything works in this noir... i'll skip all the overused and trite adjectives and just say "amazing"... a fabulous tale that gets ugly and dirty and nasty and emotional and grimy and hard as hell... spectacular...
March 30, 2020
Generally, it's not a good sign when it takes me more than a week to get to my write-up, but this time it's not the book's fault. It's just timing, timing, and terrible timing...
I spent most of this read wound up in a tight ball of stress, trying desperately to distract myself while also paying attention to my email and rescheduling various commitments. Needless to say, this was not the best reading environment, and it would have doomed a lot of books to complete obscurity in my memory. And yet, despite all that, Sara Gran's Dope kept all the attention I had to spare, yanked me in unexpected directions with its twists and turns, and socked me in the gut at the end.
It was brilliant.
One of these days, I will reread and give this book a proper review. For now, I'm just going to direct you to carol. and Melissa , whose reviews inspired me to read this book.
I spent most of this read wound up in a tight ball of stress, trying desperately to distract myself while also paying attention to my email and rescheduling various commitments. Needless to say, this was not the best reading environment, and it would have doomed a lot of books to complete obscurity in my memory. And yet, despite all that, Sara Gran's Dope kept all the attention I had to spare, yanked me in unexpected directions with its twists and turns, and socked me in the gut at the end.
It was brilliant.
One of these days, I will reread and give this book a proper review. For now, I'm just going to direct you to carol. and Melissa , whose reviews inspired me to read this book.
July 26, 2019
Dark, ugly and tense - noir thriller about former addict and missing girl in the 50s New York. Perfect one sitting read, written in a very clear and crisp language, strong female character and with interesting twisty story.
July 13, 2013
This book was billed as (paraphrasing) "Chandler-esque noir set in 1950s New York City, with a series of shocking twists", which is right in my wheelhouse as a reader. Unfortunately, I was disappointed with the results, for a couple of reasons.
One, while the similarities to Chandler are obvious, Philip Marlowe was a smartass of the highest caliber whose banter with the lowlifes he dealt with provided a welcome undercurrent of black humor throughout. Gran's protagonist here, Josephine Flannigan, is a joyless shell of a person. Which is both understandable and realistic given her background, but renders her race through the drug dens and whorehouses of NYC more workmanlike and less entertaining than I'd expected.
Two, the plot twists. Not particularly shocking until the end. Admittedly, the last one is a doozy that turns the book completely on its ear, but after closing the book and reflecting on it, I don't think it makes any sense! No spoilers here, but would be happy to discuss with any fellow readers who disagree.
Ultimately, not a bad read (certainly a quick one, which drops the pedal to the floor in the first pages and never lets up), just an underwhelming one.
One, while the similarities to Chandler are obvious, Philip Marlowe was a smartass of the highest caliber whose banter with the lowlifes he dealt with provided a welcome undercurrent of black humor throughout. Gran's protagonist here, Josephine Flannigan, is a joyless shell of a person. Which is both understandable and realistic given her background, but renders her race through the drug dens and whorehouses of NYC more workmanlike and less entertaining than I'd expected.
Two, the plot twists. Not particularly shocking until the end. Admittedly, the last one is a doozy that turns the book completely on its ear, but after closing the book and reflecting on it, I don't think it makes any sense! No spoilers here, but would be happy to discuss with any fellow readers who disagree.
Ultimately, not a bad read (certainly a quick one, which drops the pedal to the floor in the first pages and never lets up), just an underwhelming one.
February 23, 2020
Josephine Flannagan is a sleaze goddess, off the junk but still pickpocketing chumps from the subways of New York to shoplifting at Gimbel's and Macy's. A well-to-do couple pay her a $1000 retainer to help find their drug addict daughter because she looks just like her, acts like her and they reckon she knows where to find her.
That's the key to Dope: Josephine goes on a search for an addict girl just like her, and relives her past haunts, contacts and other dark ghosts of her sordid past. There's a chilling scene where she revisits a shooting gallery from her past, and although she's not tempted to tie up her body goes into an involuntary spasm of junk desire.
Sara Gran has an excellent ear for dialogue, as well as a great gift for capturing post-war sleaze. If you're a James Ellroy fan you'll probably enjoy this a great deal, too. Dope is a haunting novel of a recovered addict revisiting her nightmare days of junkie squalor and learning about herself in the process.
That's the key to Dope: Josephine goes on a search for an addict girl just like her, and relives her past haunts, contacts and other dark ghosts of her sordid past. There's a chilling scene where she revisits a shooting gallery from her past, and although she's not tempted to tie up her body goes into an involuntary spasm of junk desire.
Sara Gran has an excellent ear for dialogue, as well as a great gift for capturing post-war sleaze. If you're a James Ellroy fan you'll probably enjoy this a great deal, too. Dope is a haunting novel of a recovered addict revisiting her nightmare days of junkie squalor and learning about herself in the process.
December 31, 2018
Damn, now that's hardboiled.
May 2, 2020
Sometimes when I find a series I like, it doesn't pay to go back and read earlier work by the same author. That's not what happened here. Sara Gran hasn't let me down once so far. This is noir AF, with our narrator a recovering heroin addict and petty thief in New York in the 50s. She picks up a job trying to trace a good girl turned dope fiend for her distraught parents and it all goes bad from there. I was wrong-footed by this a couple of times, unprepared for the depth of the darkness being plumbed. It's misanthropic and seedy. Tremendous.
September 20, 2024
I would give this 2.75 stars. It’s labeled as mystery thriller but it’s not a thriller in any sense. You get a great perspective of what it was like as a door addict in the 50’s surviving in NY. What’s it’s like to live among thieves and liars. The book had a good twist. It wasn’t impossible to predict but you hoped your assumptions were wrong. The ending was not for me. Maybe it’s “realistic” but not what I hoped for.
September 2, 2021
One of the best noir mysteries I have ever read. An absolute gut-punch of an ending.
Wow.
Wow.
June 26, 2022
QUEEN GRAN!!!
January 10, 2023
This is the best noir I have read in years, and an exceptionally well-written, devastating, cannot-put-down, excellent work of art with characters that are unbearably vivid and multi-dimensional despite their singular commitment to an underworld existence. I was a little devastated, suitably surprised by the plot twists, and grateful that somebody wrote this book, as 1950s heroin addicts are perhaps underrepresented and it is important to remember those participants in the human experience who perished in neglected, tragic, obscurity. Even if there was no specific historical figure portrayed, the master writing and fantastic imagination of the author wrought a few ghosts that need a hug or a needle. The ending left me gasping. Whew. Loved this book.
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