Spaceships, gunfights and believable characters, too.

9TAIL FOXBy Jon Courtenay Grimwood Night Shade. 259 pp. Paperback, $14.95

Haldeman and Jon Courtenay Grimwood's works lie on opposite ends of the speculative fiction spectrum. Haldeman's fiction is mostly concerned with science and the future; Grimwood's is about fantasy and mood. 9Tail Fox, if nothing else, is a book rich with atmosphere, as evocative as the fog that descends on its San Francisco setting.

Grimwood, who has won two British Science Fiction Association awards, sets up 9Tail as an homage to pulp noir. The main character, cop Bobby Zha, is embroiled in a case that involves a dead Russian, a dead homeless Vet and a corrupt police force. Complicating matters is that Zha's dead, too -- and forced to solve his own murder.

This interesting premise hits on all cylinders once Zha is forced to interact with those who are mourning him. What doesn't work as well is Grimwood's prose.

Parts of 9Tail are as brisk and brusque as the best noir, with descriptions -- "a kind of dry whispering like an argument between librarians" -- that jump from the page. But the bulk of the book is uneven, offering lots of detail about how bodies decompose while providing next to none about the layout and landmarks of San Francisco itself. A subplot about the mythic nine-tailed fox and Zha's grandfather gets buried in the mix. The result is too scattershot for the reader to invest much in Grimwood's world.

Still, by book's end, Zha's growth does satisfy, as do his discoveries about his murder. You're even a little sad to see him go, no matter how blurrily Grimwood has chalked out everything around him. ¿

Adrienne Martini, the author of "Hillbilly Gothic: A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood," reviews science fiction for the Baltimore City Paper.