This Miami-based debut by Peter Pavia is the latest original release by Hard Case Crime, who have managed to establish themselves as one of the most exciting publishers currently working the crime beat. With their unmistakable pulp-homage covers and their commitment to excellent reprints (see also our review of Branded Woman in this issue) and dynamite originals, it’s hard not to be excited when a new release is just around the corner.

Dutch Uncle doesn’t disappoint, continuing Hard Case’s so far uninterrupted run of excellence. It’s a tale of small time crooks that will bring undoubted comparisons with Elmore Leonard, but Pavia is no pretender to the throne. He is clearly a unique talent in his own right and with his compelling cast, his non-intrusive authorial voice and his ability to keep you turning those pages, its clear we have a dynamite debut here.

The Dutch Uncle of the title is Manfred Pfiser, a larger than life Miami drug dealer who has embraced the Miami party lifestyle with what one might call a truly gay abandon. But the kind of people he surrounds himself with aren’t conducive to a long life and soon Manfred’s dead from gunshot wounds after what looks like a break-in gone wrong. Harry Healy, only just out of prison, and doing one last favour for the Dutch Uncle before he goes straight for good, is the first to find the body but this is only the beginning of his worries as events begin to spiral out of control and Healy’s dreams of starting a new life start to drift further away thanks to the criminal ambitions of an ex-cellmate and his less than savoury associates.

With its slick cast and its Florida setting, Peter Pavia’s debut novel is an assured piece of work; a caper novel that treats itself seriously, making sure that even if some of the characters and situations seem outrageous, the sense of danger is never diluted. It’s funny, but never ludicrous. It’s dramatic but never melodramatic. It’s just a damn fine tale of small time crooks that is every bit as funny and every bit as affecting as real life.

Pavia’s dialogue sizzles off the page. These guys are never at a loss for words, but thankfully Pavia manages to keep their sharpness in check; they’re never too slick, too assured. Some writers, writing this kind of Leonardesque work, tend to make everyone sound the same, give everyone the same smart and snappy comeback that most of us only think of three hours after we should have said it. Pavia makes us believe his dialogue and manages to easily separate the snappy, street rhythms of the small time crooks who gather round their Dutch Uncle and the world weary speech patterns of the cops who are closing in on them.

As ever, it’s the characters who make this novel work. Even Pfiser, who is little more than a shadow cast over the real events of the novel, feels rounded and real. Harry – whose journey to change his ways and find some kind of purpose in life (thanks in part to the lovely barmaid Aggie) provides the moral centre to the novel – is the kind of principled ex-con we need to root for, and yet still he is imbued with a life off the page. He’s an archetype – much like the scheming bad guys of the book, Leo, Beaumond and their buddies – but Pavia takes familiar characters like Healy and makes them fresh again, with a twist here and an unexpected moment of humanity there. If Healy was a simple archetype, then we’d be expecting him to succeed. As it is, we’re rooting for the guy to succeed. We’re on his side. We like him, and that’s the sign of good character work, when you feel like you would like this guy out in the real world. The love story between Healy and Aggie isn’t overplayed, either. Its nicely done; not romantic exactly, but the kind of thing that happens in real life where two people make a connection but its not all birds and flowers opening; they both gotta work at this thing, deal with who the other person is.

Even the cops feel real; professionals with personality. But it’s not like that personality is thrown in our faces. Pavia shows us in subtle ways, with a gesture or a moment of dialogue letting us get a glimpse into who these guys are, what it is that makes them tick. They don’t need a gimmick to be real. Arnie Martinson feels solid and real, a good investigator and decent guy and from the moment he walks into the Pfiser crime scene, just through his impressions of the other cops on the scene, you know who he is. Again, another character who could have been an archetype – the grizzled, professional detective – is granted a lease of life through attention to detail and those small character moments that really bring life to a novel.

If there is a problem with Dutch Uncle, its that sometimes Pavia sticks too close to the rules of the Florida caper. That natural flow, the loose narrative that comes together tightly at the end, the small eccentricities that mark out the criminals, it’s the kind of thing we see a lot from people who want to be compared to Leonard. But Pavia’s got one up on them, because he manages to take all of this and by the novel’s end make it his own. Hopefully, as Pavia continues, he’ll be able to shake these inevitable comparisons and carve out his own unique place in the crime arena. There are certainly signs of this in Dutch Uncle, and his prose is so confident you know Pavia’s a writer to watch. The prose is every bit as slick and easy-going as the characters, and you can hear the laid back drawl of an author with a good tale to tell; an author who’s just going to love telling it to you.

Dutch Uncle is a brilliant first novel from a talented writer. The knowing – but never intrusive – prose, the slick characters and deceptively loose construction that suddenly comes together in a brilliantly tight and orchestrated fashion make it the ideal caper to read out in the back garden on a day when the sun’s high in the sky. So go on, break open a beer, kick back in the sun and enjoy some time in the company of some real cool customers down Florida way.