Sometime in the late 1960s, Walker West is a young man at loose ends in New York City. He wants to be a writer, but has had no success. Witnessing an explosion, he helps to rescue a couple victims from beneath the rubble. One of them is a young woman, with whom he immediately falls in love. A moment later, the police come along to arrest that young woman for the murder of her fiancé. Walker impulsively promises her that he’ll prove her innocence.

So begins A Fire In Every Vein, by Lawrence J. Epstein. It’s the first book in a series of mysteries. As a novice investigator, Walker has one advantage the average guy doesn’t enjoy – his Aunt Agatha (a tribute to P. G. Wodehouse?), who is very rich and very influential. Being concerned over her nephew’s lack of motivation to date, she happily encourages his sudden enthusiasm by providing him with an office, an attractive female assistant, and a bodyguard. She also pulls strings to get him hired as a crime reporter by a New York paper, and as an investigator by the insurance company concerned, so he has two excuses to poke his nose into the case.

If that seems like a lot of what’s known nowadays as “privilege,” I thought the same thing. Money can be a great advantage for a fictional investigator (see Lord Peter Wimsey [who gets an endorsement in this book] and Nick Charles), but a protagonist in a story needs to struggle too. It often felt as if Walker was getting along too easily – though he suffers plenty of setbacks, most often because of his own rookie mistakes.

And that’s another problem with the story. A learning curve works just fine as a template for rising dramatic tension, but Walker seems to be almost laughably feckless.

I stayed with A Fire in Every Vein to the end because the author is a decent writer in the grammatical sense. He can string a sentence together, which puts him ahead of most novelists nowadays. And I couldn’t help identifying personally with Walker’s cluelessness.

But overall, the book didn’t work. The characters weren’t distinctive, and the dialogue was unnatural. Graceful and grammatical, yes, but not natural.

What finally disappointed me, though, was the ending, which (in my view) was so inconsistent with the tone of the rest of the book that it felt like a cheat.

I believe author Epstein has written further novels, and I’m glad of it. I think he has the makings of a good novelist. But A Fire in Every Vein just didn’t work for me.