Books like The Last Good Kiss

P BRYANT'S 18 RULES FOR HARD-BOILED PRIVATE EYE NOVELISTS1) The hero of your hard-boiled private-eye genre thriller shall be irresistible to women, mostly. Say about 80%, no need to stretch credulity. He will shag at least four women he encounters during the story and will also gently, sensitively refuse to shag a fifth one, not because he's tired out but because it wouldn't be the right thing. He has morals.2) All the women are sexually bold. They all sleep naked.3) He will take a good few beatings - broken fingers, ribs. Obviously nothing that's going to put him in traction for 6 weeks but enough that we know he's very tough and he suffers. Shagging and suffering - very important in the life of the private eye.4) He will have a perpetual handy store of tough one-liners but will have an unexpected intellectual streak such as a love of chess or TS Eliot or Ludwig Wittgenstein.5) He will plough on through the corkscrew plot twists and not know what the hell he's doing but his instincts will guide him to a just if messy conclusion.6) He will rescue someone from something and it will go horribly wrong. This will show that he's human.7) He will have a quirk, like a comical pet, such as a bulldog who drinks beer, or being a laplander. Anything. But get that quirk.8) He will have no friends and especially no girlfriend - if he had a girlfriend then he'd be cheating when he shags the five women he encounters during the story, and we do not want our readers thinking our hero has no morals. He is a very moral guy.9) He will drink so much during the course of all this that an actual human being would have been hospitalised by page 35.10) He seems as the story starts to have no cases on the go, nothing is doing at all. We have to wonder how he makes ends meet. But maybe, given his sexual prowess, he moonlights as Dick Bold in the Naughty Nurses series from Cinema Triple X - come to think, there IS a resemblance. 11) There will be a person in the story who completely reinvents herself, to the point that when we meet them again on page 125 in their reinvented state we have no idea who they were. (So Diana Sonnderling was really Betty Ann Grot? And Pope John Paul II was really.... Dan Brown?? Or - no - the other way round!!) The identity revelation is a Big Plot Shock and either resolves everything or further complicates it, whatever.12) There will be an older, really sexy woman. Much will be made of the fact that she's Older. But Sexy as Well. This will be piled on with a trowel.13) The bad guys will spend money like water. They'll never run out. If they write off several cars in pursuit of the hero, several more will appear, as if by magic.14) The first lot of bad guys are not the real bad guys, even if they seem really bad.15) The police, the judges, the lawyers, the coroners, they're all on the payroll. 16) Drugs and porn generate vast amounts of money so somewhere at the bubbling plot spring of the story there will be drugs or porn.17) Someone has a guilty secret which will turn out to be very significant to all the plot corkscrews. Usually this is an illegitimate daughter but it could be that the person used to be Dan Brown. 18) Everything must be very believable otherwise by page 125 your readers will already be thinking now, is this a one star book or a two star book? Hmm - one, two? Well, I didn't hate it THAT much. Okay, it's a nice day, I feel pretty good, so two.