The Detective Writer: Sirloin On A Black Eye

Three years ago the guy who created me lost interest in the detective novel he was writing.

He left me in limbo with a slab of sirloin plastered to my eye.

He had read somewhere that in crime fiction every chapter should close with a cliffhanger. So he had some goon land a roundhouse punch on my right eye. Putting meat on a shiner is something they used to do in gangster movies. It doesn’t stop the swelling and it poses significant bacterial risk.

During my stay in purgatory, waiting for him to start writing again, I managed to break out of my Word doc, wriggled out of the folders I was trapped in and burrowed through 301.84 GB of data on his laptop. I’ve read every email he’s ever received.

It has been an education.

I discovered that people who aren’t active in their careers anymore still crave recognition. A lot of them of them never learn to relax. They’re like those pelagic bony fish that drown if they stop swimming.

My creator has tried a lot of stuff that hasn’t panned out. He’s approaching this novel of his in bits and spurts, not investing great hopes in its prospects.

I am thrilled to tell you that, as of this morning, he’s back in the window at the coffee shop, clacking away on a new chapter.

He’s a few hundred words in and already I know my fate. I get booted out of AA. I work undercover as a used-car repo man. My frig is empty. My sainted mother doesn’t return my calls. There’s zero chance he lets me log into eHarmony or Christian Mingle.

The pop-fiction workshop at our local library offered an introductory “problem-solving” session. They impressed on the guy that private detectives are more engaging if they have some kind of disorder to overcome.

At this very moment he’s browsing through a bookmarked list of medical websites hoping to find an affliction that will make you like me. And so it goes.

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Private Detective #3 Gun at camera

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…so this goon who works for a nefarious, underworld kingpin who is strong-arming my client — a beautiful, long-legged vixen of course— has me cornered in a gritty but overpriced public-parking garage. His gun is pointed directly at my head.

I’ve counted how many of those Teflon-coated rounds he’s got left. (Private dicks like me always count shots fired.)

So he goes like “Say your prayers, Bulldog.” with a brusque but politically correct and therefore highly marketable foreign accent. He raises his piece, trigger finger twitching and then…and then…

(OH NO!!!! NOT AGAIN!!!! THIS CAN NOT BE HAPPENING AGAIN!!!!!”)

The old fool who is developing me as the lead character of his story decides to stop writing mid-sentence…and chat with Debbi.

And then…the old fool gets himself some water.

And then…he talks to the kid from the theological seminary.

And then…he checks his email (Visa is insisting on s a new password).

And then…he closes “Private Detective Episode 3.docx” without saving it.

And then…he ignores the project for another month leaving me frozen in time with a gun pointed at my head, wondering how I’m gonna look with the Holland Tunnel between my eyes. Closed casket, please.

A little advice to anyone who wants to get into the fictional-character game. Don’t quit your day job, avoid parking garages and stay away from old men with keyboards.

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Private Detective #2

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The old fool’s back at his keyboard again. This guy couldn’t realize a living, breathing fictional character if his Social Security checks depended on it.

You may recall that I’m trapped in the laptop of an old man trying to create a private detective story. I’m like his main character. Somebody shoot me.

He’s all “noir” these days. He thinks because he drives an internally rusting 10-year-old Toyota beater he understands anti-heroes. What does he know from lurking in the shadows? He eats English muffins — for God’s sake!

He keeps telling me if we’re going to sell our property to Hollywood, we (we?) got to cast a statuesque dame (his exact words). I told him they don’t make “dames” no more and if he don’t want to blow an endorsement from Oprah, he’s got to be careful about how he refers to babes. He promised to stay away from rapper words.

“What actress you got in mind as my romantic interest?” I asked.

“I’m thinking Julie Christie.” he said.

“A fine artist,” I replied, “but she ain’t the box office she used to.”

“Okay, Tuesday Weld then.”

“She dead.” I told him. He took that kinda hard.

“Well, who do you got in mind, Bulldog?” he asked me sardonically (for a private dick I got a vocabulary, am I right?).

So I says, “Scarlett Johannson.”

“You think we can get her?” he asked.

“By the time you finish this novel/treatment/screenplay — whatever the #?%$ you call it — she’ll be working dinner-theater. Maybe then you got a chance.”

His laptop’s got this built-in camera so I could see his face twist up. I knew right away I ticked him off. I watched his keystrokes with despair as he navigated over to Yahoo’s search engine and entered: k – a – t – h – y – b – a – t – e – s.

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Private Detective #1

“I make my living with my fists but I’m not one of your lowlife private detectives.

“For one thing I’m careful about my client list — I only work for dames who got gams, real elegant like. For another, I drive a Vette.

“Nice people like you pay money to people like me to make problems go away. But I got a problem of my own, one of them existential problems (for those of you who don’t read that means a problem that exists).

“Of all the geniuses working away on fancy laptops in the windows of this two-bit java joint, I have to end up on the hard drive of a complete and total jamoke. I exist only as a fictional character whose future is in this guy’s hands.

“What does he know about your character development, your mood, your narrative tension? Not a damned thing, that’s what. He made his living by WRITING ADS for God’s sake — Mr. Urge-To-Action. The only plot he’ll ever get close to is in the cheap, no-headstone section of Rosehill.

“When he’s not over there yukking it up with his crew, or counting to ten in Spanish, he’s running off to the bathroom (buy Kimberly-Clark). I keep telling him to see somebody about that prostrate thing of his.

“Anyway my story’s going nowhere, and fast. Did I mention I killed a guy twice?”

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