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.
