I’m inclined to support my local mystery writers, as you know, so when I got a Kindle deal on one of Mike Faricy’s Dev Haskell mysteries, I thought I’d try it out. Glad I did. These are not highbrow mysteries, nor are they world-weary meditations on existential dilemmas. They’re just fun private eye stories that poke gentle fun at the form. I liked them.

Dev Haskell is a private eye in St. Paul. He has no office, but does a marginal business out of a string of scruffy bars. At the beginning of Russian Roulette he’s approached in one of those bars by a drop dead gorgeous woman with an accent (she says it’s French and he goes along with it) who asks him to look for her missing sister. Thinking more with a lower organ than with his higher functions, he follows her into a plot involving prostitution and sex trafficking.

The big joke in Russian Roulette is the way Dev overworks the traditional private eye pastime of getting injured and not letting it stop him. Not only does he suffer the liturgical beatings and a bullet wound that any literary private eye expects, but he also gets poisoned and car bombed. It stretches credibility that he’s able to function at all, let alone defend himself, by the end of the story, but that’s all part of the joke.

In the second book, Mr. Swirlee, Dev is hired by a local business mogul, a guy who runs a fleet of ice cream trucks, to investigate a death threat. Not only is “Mr. Swirlee” a lousy, tightwad client, but he’s a crook as well. Nevertheless Dev does meet an attractive woman, and he doesn’t get injured quite as badly this time out.

The Dev Haskell books are pure entertainment and very well done. Cautions for the usual stuff. Recommended for grownups who know the genre and don’t mind laughing gently at it.