Jack Flippo used to be a medium-but-getting-bigger cheese in the Dallas DA's office. That was until his affair with a woman who just happened to share married life with a highly prosecutable local dealer. Jack Flippo lost his wife, his job, and his reputation. Now Jack Flippo snoops for shabby attorney Hal Roper, who wants the man to get the goods on one Buddy George Junior.

In public Buddy George Junior is the wealthy huckster guru of high-pressure selling, but with some oh-so-slightly dubious hotel room techniques with the young women he picks up at his conferences-cum-sermons.

Jack Flippo certainly gets his evidence, but why did the woman who hired Roper claim to be Buddy George Junior's wife? Why is Roper's luggish-thuggish, dapper right-hand-man Teddy Deuce trying to freelance? And why is there an unknown black man with his head down the toilet in the huckster's Dallas hotel room?

Doug J. Swanson's debut comes trumpeting its award for Best First Crime Novel of the Year and a rapturous quote from genre-virtuoso Carl Hiaasen all over its lurid Day-Glo pink and yellow cover. It's easy to see why if we contrast Hiaasen's early work to this (and it's a valid comparison - Swanson, like Hiaasen, is a jobbing reporter). This stuff just slides off the page, so well is it oiled. It took Hiaasen a while to get this good.

The refreshing thing, of course, is to see a book like this shifted from its natural habitat in Florida up to Texas, and yet check most of the obvious TV clichés at the door. Swanson's tight, concise prose has real legs, as though it could walk right off the page and on screen:

"It tells you there's a turd in the soup. The redheaded broad says she's Mrs. Buddy George and she lives in Highland Park. You say she lives in some coloured neighbourhood in Oak Lawn. Jack says he knows nothing. The tape says he knows something."

Certainly the book has a cinematic ring to it, and Swanson directs the convoluted plotting with a sure hand, never letting the amateurish extortion and robbery slip its leash and make for the hills.

It also comes in a curiously traditional wrapping, recalling less the chaotic slap-stick of late Hiaasen and more the careful, intricately plotted Hammett or Chandler. Is it any coincidence that it comes on like the set-up in Nicholson's undervalued The Two Jakes? That the end bears similarities to the Coen's marvellous gangster-flick Miller's Crossing? Or carries one or two thumb-marks straight out of The Maltese Falcon? Like Spade (especially Bogart's Spade) Jack Flippo is guided by a sense of internal morality governed by a sliding-scale of available women.

Big Town is a major debut - smartly built, grittily run, with a cynical, engaging and genuinely funny voice at the back of it all. Chalk up a considerable win to Doug J. Swanson and expect a lot of leading genre figures to start watching their backs soonest.