While we tend to assume first-time novelists write what they know, you can also write what you read – and so much the better, perhaps, if your intake isn’t strictly literary, as Paul Auster and Jonathan Lethem found when they began their careers by strip-mining the classics of hard-boiled detective fiction and sci-fi.

It’s the Auster/Lethem path that Scottish writer Alan Trotter takes in this exciting debut, a rewired noir narrated by a teetotal hoodlum, Box, touting for business with another tough known only as _____, the first sign that this won’t be a straight story. Amid a turf war between local landlords, the pair forge a name as handy debt collectors. “We took him to a hold-up outside the new quarter: two rooms and no neighbours,” Box says of one victim. “Soon we were mainly waiting for the times when he regained consciousness.”

The novel’s never-specified setting, an American city after (we’re guessing) the Korean war, is built more or less entirely out of period lingo. “The way you were putting the fright into that frail up there, that was something special,” someone says of Box’s way with women; someone else suggests getting “the buttons involved” or calling the cops.

An absurdist air hangs over the near-wordless companionship of these hardmen, who enjoy fairground rides and milkshakes between hit jobs. In a lean spell, they’re paid to pretend to fight by a gang of triplets out to pickpocket distracted passersby, but the scam goes awry when _____ , the more vicious of the two, gets carried away. They barely know each other, meeting when _____ is thrown out of a passing car in the opening pages; he later drops out of the novel almost as suddenly.

Added strangeness comes from gnomic interludes involving a pair of contract killers, Hector and Charles, shown pushing victims from a train en route to a psychiatric hospital while philosophising about the nature of remorse. How these scenes will dovetail with the main narrative is something we can’t guess; ditto for passages about Box’s friendship with Holcomb, a poker-playing author of pulp science fiction. The most Austerish part of Muscle consists of Box reading Holcomb’s story about a scientist who, having visited the future, hesitates to tell his past self, because of how it might diminish his sense of agency, an idea that surfaces with dramatically raised stakes late in the novel after Box commits his most disturbing act of violence.

Until that point, Muscle seems like an experiment in putting a sideman centre-stage. “I was sick of being shrapnel, spinning out from something I had no say in,” Box says, taking a bit part in yet another beating.

But things accelerate when, paid to chase Holcomb’s debt, a job Box takes without qualms, he strikes out on his own to follow the trail to Holcomb’s squeeze, Evelyn’ a dental assistant sometimes referred to as “the love interest”, in one of the novel’s more openly meta gestures.

Here’s where it gets messy: the novel’s clout comes to rest on how Box manages his emotions once he arrives in Evelyn’s life, as Trotter’s pastiche edges into more painful exploration of male violence and its aftermath. You see what he’s up to – questioning noir motifs rather than just rehearsing them – but can’t help feeling the novel gets into waters that are too deep and too murky for the abrupt resolution to be persuasive. Still, for three-quarters of the novel, Muscle is some high-wire act, channelling Samuel Beckett as well as Dashiell Hammett, with a dash of quantum mechanics to boot.

• Muscle is published by Faber (£10). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99