Joe Novak

I've mentioned my private eye hero Joe Novak here so often that I thought the thing could need some explaining. Here's an entry I wrote for Kevin Burton Smith's extraordinary Thrilling Detective site:

Joe Novak
by Juri Nummelin

Joe Novak is a private eye working in Los Angeles, getting mixed up in sleazy swindles, but usually looking at things happening as an outsider.

Joe Novak stories are somewhere between parody and pastiche, and some of them are not really stories about a P.I. solving cases, but they can also be about a P.I. getting out of the troubles in his own personal life. Novak is a WWII veteran and he has horrible memories from the Ardennes. Novak delights in reading hardboiled paperbacks, but he has also studied philosophy at university under the G.I. bill. He dates several women and has trouble finding a suitable one.

The series of short stories is written by Juri Nummelin, who is normally a non-fiction writer. The Joe Novak stories have been published in the Isku magazine, a Finnish small press zine specializing in hardboiled crime fiction.

The stories:

Änkyttävän naapurin tapaus/The Case of the Stuttering Neighbour, Isku # 5 (2006).
Eripuraisten naapurien tapaus/The Case of the Quarreling Neighbours, Isku # 4 (2006).
Merirosvoaarteen tapaus/The Case of the Pirate Treasure, Isku # 3 (2005)
Kävelykeppien tapaus/The Case of the Walking Sticks, Isku # 2 (2005).
Ikkunattoman monadin tapaus/The Case of the Windowless Monad, Isku # 1 (2004).