Helmut Hesse is one half of the Fog City Detective Agency. The muscle and money half. The other half is a Druid named Shamus, and the world that gets saved is a 1940s noir version of ours, but with fallen angels and the occasional mage thrown in. All in all, it’s fun.
Helmut Haase is one half of the Fog City Detective Agency. The muscle and money half. The other half is a Druid named Shamus, and the world that gets saved is a 1940s noir version of ours, but with fallen angels and the occasional mage thrown in. All in all, it’s a fun debut from Matt Sheehan.
Helmut Saves the World in a mere 87 pages, or he would if it came in a dead-tree edition. It’s just out from Carina Press, Harlequin’s digital only line, and it’s one of the few books from that house that doesn’t feature shirtless beefcake as the main cover element. Considering that Helmut is your standard Robert Mitchum type noir PI, and that he lives in a world full of dames eager to give up their digits, it could have. I applaud their restraint.
Helmut and his partner Shamus live in a world that’s close to 1940s San Francisco, but includes an ongoing fight between the Allies and the Empire which we’re not in yet, or staying out of, or something. It’s an alternatish universe, where fallen angels are a known quantity, if one that’s contractually bound to stay out of our hair, and where Druids command the weather, take psychic readings off stuff, and whatnot. Shamus is just such a Druid, he’s pretty handy to have around a detective agency, though he’s really hard to motivate, preferring beer, books, and the company of his dog over actually doing any sleuthing. He leaves that up to Helmut. Also the fighting, which is one of our boy’s very favorite things.
As it happens in these tales, the two get a client, Alek Pallas, and a case, an absconded employee with company secrets to recover, and quickly discover that things aren’t as simple as they seem. Although Helmut’s main motivations are dollars and dames, he’s got an uncomfortable moral streak, just as Raymond Chandler would prescribe for any one walking mean streets, with or without magic, and when he discovers that the employee on the lam isn’t the bad guy, he has to find a way to keep an innocent man from the wolves and still collect a fee, if at all possible.
What he doesn’t see coming is that his client is a shape-shifter and not at all who he claims to be, and that the real forces arrayed against Shamus and him are more than a little demonic. Fortunately, as he says at the outset, they don’t die, and he hopes that doesn’t ruin it for us.
Things happen fast in this short, almost comedic collision noir/urban fantasy, but given the book’s length they have to. Just about the time I thought we were heading for an intermission, the lights went up and the author’s bio appeared, but OK, at a buck ninety-nine, you still get your money’s worth. At least Sheehan brought the caper to a conclusion, though one that primes the next episode. As detective stories run on cases, short episodes work fine. If the author manages to work through a bigger story arc in the process, he can always issue a compilation at a more bookish length.
This is not deep stuff. Helmut’s proclivity for bedding gals and pounding goons does not make him out to be a complex character, and for the first few pages I wondered whether it was worth the ride. At least he doesn’t drink, leaving that to his partner, and it’s the interplay between him and Shamus, to say nothing of the dog, that makes him tolerable. Though he works his way casually through one night stands in a fairly pointless way, he does manage to get tangled up with at least one gal that matches his mettle.
A minor irk, which I’ll mention anyway, is that Helmut grumbles to us that he’d like a cash reward for saving the world, which is maybe just his nature, except that the bag of gold he walks away with should probably have covered it.
All in all, by the end of Helmut Saves the World I was enjoying the book pretty well, and had even developed a certain amount of affection for the tough guy in the title. When Matt Sheehan strikes again, I’ll be downloading Helmut and Shamus’ next case to see how our boys are making out.
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