"Alive in Necropolis": the dead do tell tales in this dark and funny debut

If Colma, Calif., didn't exist, novelists would have to invent it. But it does exist, and a novelist — Doug Dorst, to be exact — has cannily taken advantage of that.

Colma has for decades been a necropolis — a city of the dead — for San Francisco. It has 17 cemeteries for people and one for pets. Colma's live population is about 1,500, but its dead number a million and a half. It's the only incorporated town in America where the dead outnumber the living.

Among the interments: lawman Wyatt Earp, newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, baseball great Joe DiMaggio, several politicians (including Pat Brown and George Moscone), and Tina Turner's dog, allegedly resting forever wrapped in one of her fur coats.

You'd think that such a setting would be catnip for imaginative literary types. Indeed, Dorst has stated his astonishment that no one had yet written fiction set there. Now he's stepped into the breach with a quirky debut, "Alive in Necropolis" (Riverhead, 437 pp., $25.95) — an intriguing mix of coming-of-age story, police procedural and magical realism.

Mike Mercer is a rookie on the Colma police force. It's a quiet job. He has plenty of time to hang with his crass but entertaining police partner, and with his college friends in San Francisco. Plenty of time, too, to ruminate about his place in the world, and about his dismay that said college pals are drifting away to live their own lives.

For a while, Mercer's biggest problems seem to be romantic. He's having trouble accepting the fact that his girlfriend, a nurse, is several years older. And he's strongly attracted to a journalist who is closer to his age but is not, shall we say, the truest of hearts.

Then Mercer discovers a crime: a teen, trussed with duct tape and abandoned in one of the town's cemeteries. This kid, Jude, has a famous father, some disreputable friends, a nascent drug habit and a determination not to rat out whoever left him there.

Mercer becomes a hero for finding the kid, but things are getting a little weird for the cop. It seems that the dead spirits of Colma are all around — and they have their own problems with law and order.

Hints that all is not well in the spirit world start to reach Mercer. Of course, he can't report them — who would believe him? But he can't ignore them, either, and danger mounts as Mercer is pulled further into the "lives" of such buried but still active spirits as the famed socialite Lillie Hitchcock Coit.

Much of the success of "Alive in Necropolis" rests on Dorst's skillful use of the gallows humor so common to police departments. (The ones in novels, at least.) The cop-chat, most of it unrepeatable here, is priceless. And Dorst is also good at depicting Mercer's mental processes, from romantic ambivalence to awareness of spirits.

Somewhat less successful is his prose about the dead. (Ghost writing? Sorry, couldn't resist.) These passages, though often beautiful, seem self-conscious, with too strong a whiff of the writers' workshop. (Dorst graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches college creative writing in Texas.) And they seem ill fitted to the rest of the book.

This novel, sprawled across more than 400 pages, would have benefited from a more stringent editor, who could have helped tone down its excesses and stitch its seams. Nonetheless, "Alive in Necropolis" is a solid debut from a very promising writer.

Adam Woog reviews crime fiction the second Sunday of each month in The Seattle Times.