Loy's in the hood

Crime: What's in a name? When it comes to crime fiction, quite a lot, as it happens. You don't need to be a licensed private detective to figure out which fictional investigators are truly top-notch: just open the book and take a peek at the name. It's what used to be called a clue. Think about it. Morse. Rebus.

A code and a puzzle, respectively.

Battle of the Yard: a man to be relied on. Harry "Hieronymous" Bosch and Aurelio Zen. And so it goes on, the name of the game being that if you're a thoughtful writer and you're planning to create a thoughtful character, you need to be up to speed in the nomenclature department - or risk falling at the first literary hurdle.

The sight of the words "An Ed Loy mystery" striped across the cover of this debut crime outing by an Irish writer, then, is enough to lift the heart. (Of course, though his own name is itself new to this genre, Hughes is well-known as a playwright, theatre director and one of the founders of theatre company Rough Magic.) I'd be prepared to swear that there has never been a character in Irish crime fiction with a name as taut, muscular and slyly tongue-in-cheek - not to mention self-consciously hardboiled - as Ed Loy. Shades of Sam Spade, summoned up in an instant.

Sure enough, Loy has strong transatlantic ties. Once upon a time, we are told, he fled to the west coast of America - another good sign: hippie leanings, surely? - after finding his mother in flagrante in a south Dublin suburb. And he is strongly tempted to go straight back there when, having come home to bury his errant parent, he finds just about everyone he ever knew in Dublin turning up dead.

Loy, needless to say, stays put.

And he can do hardboiled with the best of them. The book's opening sentence is a cheeky nod to Chandler: "The night of my mother's funeral, Linda Dawson cried on my shoulder, put her tongue in my mouth and asked me to find her husband."

Hughes, though - unlike several recent Irish crime-writing wannabes - has done his homework properly. He knows that too much hardboiled gives the contemporary reader severe indigestion. Thus our man Loy, for all his wise-cracking exterior, has a heart of pure marshmallow.

He doesn't just seduce his bleached-blonde client; he falls in love with her.

He is also - as the chilling quote from the book of Genesis which casts its shadow on the opening chapter suggests - a good enough mixture of moralist and poet to keep things interesting through 300 pages.

All in all, The Wrong Kind of Blood is the sort of crime novel you really want to read, rather than the sort you just tag along with. The plot is well-constructed, the characters well-rounded. The dialogue is to die for. Even the guards are good - well, maybe not good exactly, but not, as has become commonplace in Irish crime writing, either risibly incompetent or boorishly dull.

Best of all, there's plenty of sardonic comment about Dublin, and the way it lives now (although if Hughes thinks he's going to get a good review from this newspaper, after what he says about us, he can think again).

So are there any quibbles? Just one.

But it's a big one. Having got the name of his anti-hero exactly right, Hughes makes a bad decision in setting his story in a series of fictional suburbs, such as "Bayview", "Seafield" etc.

Not so much a code and a puzzle as a cop-out and a disappointment. To be truly top-notch, crime fiction needs a sense of place - a real place. We can only hope that, with the next instalment, Hughes will change his modus operandi, and get down to good old dirty Dublin.

The Wrong Kind of Blood By Declan Hughes John Murray, 302pp. £12.99

Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist