Plot Summary: Meet Lou Rossi, a Generation X slacker who’s out of step with the rave culture of Miami, 1990. He’s a freelance newspaper artist, an aspiring author, a 21-year-old virgin... and suddenly an amateur detective. His humdrum life takes a turn when he meets—and quickly falls in love with—the young and beautiful Janet Laughton. But when she suddenly vanishes, leaving only a cryptic note behind, Lou will have to pull out all the stops to track her down.

Review: Lou Rossi is not a PI. Like at all. Dry County takes place in 1990 and Lou draws a weekly comic strip for the local alt-weekly. He also writes that occasional film review. However, this is a PI story. It explicitly takes the form and shape and intonations of a PI story and does so earnestly.

Lou goes to do laundry in his buildings laundry room and meets a woman he’s never seen there before. They chat and hit it off. Whatever this is it isn’t fully love. There’s definitely a connection but it’s probably closer to lust. Lou was probably just hoping to get laid. But there’s something nascent there. You take those early stage feelings and put them into someone who is maybe a little bored and has an active imagination and you get a guy like Lou and a story like Dry County.

Perhaps it’s most endearing quality is that there is no nudging or winking at the audience. It’s easy to imagine a version of this story where Lou is a fan of detective fiction and that love becomes the narrative thrust of the story. Those types of winking meta narratives can put distance between the characters and the audience. Dry County removes any such barriers by just having this be a (kinda) detective story. He wants to know what happened to the girl and so he sets out to find the answer. Along the way he meets all sorts of wild people. Because this isn’t fully a genre story the full array of genre thrills aren’t always present, there isn’t some grand conspiracy that goes to the highest halls of power. The resolution is more mundane and fitting for this world.

Dry County takes some of the tropes and story beats from classic noirboiled tales and filters them through a slacker, 90’s independent film/alt weekly comic style. The story has a strong sense of urgency as it maintains a tight perspective with the MC but at the same time there isn’t a strong sense of danger. Tommaso likes the shaggy beats of the classic noirboiled tune but doesn’t want to dance with the psychosexual undertones those films often carried. This is a different kind of PI story and a lot of fun.

Dry County is Elliott Gould’s Marlowe meets Richard Linklater’s Slacker by way of the forgotten MTV show Austin Stories (1997/98) or Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Dry County is slacker noir or The Long Good Shrug.

Verdict: positive/highly recommended

Availability: Dry County is available in print and I read it through the library service Hoopla

First off, would you say Lou Rossi is modeled after you in any way?

Yes, he’s part of a plan I had come up with back in 2009, which was to make a series of crime novels heavily based on my own life experiences. Each one would be set in a different place in the U.S. – all of the places I had myself lived: Florida, Main, New Jersey, Seattle, New York, Vermont, and my current home, Atlanta. With this first book, it was easy enough to take my own story of a troubled, unrequited romance and spin it into a “missing girl” crime yarn.