"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room."-Raymond Chandler
Dream job three; writing pulpy detective novels.
Of course I’ve read the works of Dashiell Hammett and James Elroy and I’ve seen enough film noir to get the gist of how a successful, fictional detective behaves, so to create a good one I’d need certain character traits.
He needs to have a drinking problem. Not a beer or wine drinking problem but hard liquor drinking problem like bourbon or scotch, or Nyquil. A gambling problem can be used as a substitute but that’s harder to feed seeing as how bars and liquor stores can be found on nearly as many street corners as people spinning signs that advertise “We Buy Gold!” or “Oak Furniture Liquidation,” whereas casinos and bookies require a little more work to root out. Although I suppose a good detective shouldn’t have too much trouble locating either of those.
He’ll need to have a whip smart, young, tight-skirt-wearing, brunette, girl Friday, who is pinning for his affections. She needs to have an innocent name like Annabelle or Hedwig, but have a less than innocent side to which he is blind. She needs to be able to do crack research, provide bail, and deliver coffee and aspirin at the drop of a hat. Oh, He’ll need a hat too.
His cases will have to either have a client who is a, or involves a femme fatale. This woman needs to be mysterious, ooze a cocktail of sexual tension and indifference, sport either a large hat or a shock of hair covering one eye, smoke almost continuously, and deposit her fingerprints on murder weapons and doorknobs at crime scenes or leave the aroma of her distinctive perfume at these same locations. Wine glasses with her lipstick turning up in the same room with dead bodies wouldn’t hurt either. She should be blonde (which is why his assistant needs to be a brunette). A redhead can be substituted for the femme fatale but not for the assistant, unless the assistant has freckles. When he first meets her the running dialog in his head should say something like, “I tried to pay her as little attention as possible but with those porcelain legs, those red lips, and that silver .38 cal police special in her hands, she was about as easy to ignore as a trombone player in Bible class.”
He’ll need a longtime friend who can be counted on to provide information that the police, FBI, or Scotland Yard couldn’t unearth in a million years with a million shovels. He can be a bartender, former partner, obscure family member, or run a diner. His drinking problem should be worse than my detective’s and he should always need rent money or “just a few bucks to get by.” Occasionally he should take over for my guy on stakeouts or following leads. If he ever is assigned to follow the femme fatale, he should either end up discovering she is lying about everything she has told him or end up dead.
My detective will need an office in an old building on the rundown side of town. It should be upstairs, no elevator, and have a door with a semi-opaque window through which he can only discern the silhouettes of anyone in his lobby. The furniture should be wood, secondhand, and uncomfortable. No air conditioning but instead an oscillating fan that moves with the speed of a man driving to the dentist, and a pulsing, red neon sign just outside the window over the large sofa where he sleeps (passes out) most nights. His ink blotter will have nothing hidden under it but everyone else’s will hide case-turning clues. The bottom right drawer of his desk should contain two dirty tumblers and that bottle of bourbon or scotch. The bottom left drawer should be stuck closed.
There should be goons. Big guys with high testosterone levels and low IQs. They should work for the femme fatale’s husband, boyfriend, or employer. He should meet them when he’s yanked off the street and stuffed between them into the back seat of a large, dark, American car. After delivering a message/beating from their boss, they should dump him in an alley or down by the harbor where his assistant or that longtime friend should find him, take him back to his office, and patch him up; all the while lecturing him on his line of work. Even though they were born and raised in the United States, they should speak English like it’s a second language. Saying things like, “I should ought to have knowed.”
When he dispatches a bad guy by either getting the drop on him or tossing him off a building, he’ll need to deliver a proper catch phrase. I’m thinking of, “That’s going on my resume.” He’ll seldom carry a gun but when he does it will not be something modern and dependable like The Sig Sauer P290 Two-Tone sub-compact 9MM, with integrated laser module and removable grips. He’d have the Browning M1911 .45 instead. It’s square, clunky, and not particularly accurate but it’s loud enough to garner the most jaded denizen of the lower parts of town’s attention, and if you happen to hit your target it does a lot of damage. He will constantly have it taken from him before he gets a shot off.
He’d also need something to set him apart; a quirk that in turn makes him both distinctive and slightly snarky. Perhaps he could quote Shakespeare, live on an old tugboat in Oxnard, or always be popping junior mints in his mouth, or all three.
He’d have to work in Los Angeles. Although it’s the last place I’d choose to live in California, I must admit the best detective stories, both book and film, are set there. William Faulkner called it, “The plastic asshole of the world.” Talk about your ringing endorsements. Los Angeles seems like a city where the majority of the population just ended up; gathered from the rest of the country, pressed and pushed out of Mr. Faulkner’s orifice of choice until they found themselves at the edge of the continent, stuck against the waves without means of surmounting them, and no desire to turn around. Once those people came to grips with their plight, they started figuring out ways to get by. Some do honestly and others not so much. My detective would protect the former from the latter.
I’ll need proper and attention getting titles. I looked up the top 100 crime novels to see what the titles have in common. Forty five of the 100 start with the word “the” (The Third Man, The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon, etc..) so that will have to be in there. Eighteen either have the words dead or death, or a reference to it like The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, or Game, Set & Match, so a reference to death needs to be included. Thirteen mention a woman’s name or a reference to sexual desire so add that to the pot. Eleven have some variation of “man” in the title if you include postman, policeman, and Chinaman, so “man” is in. So I plug all this information into the detective story name generator (The, woman’s name, death, man) and get the title: The Madonna Murder Man. Yuck. Maybe I’ll just give the book an incredibly obscure title to get people’s attention, like writer Paul Gosling did when he wrote a book that made the 100 list titled, “The Running Duck.”
Finally my detective will need a name. Days of the week make good names but Monday played for the Hated dodgers, the actress Tuesday Weld – who would make a great girl Friday if she dyed her hair – has that day, Wednesday is taken by the charming girl from the Adams Family, Thursday is brilliantly used in Jasper Fforde’s work, and Friday is already taken by Dragnet’s Joe. That leaves Saturday and Sunday. Saturday seems a little too cheery for a detective so I’m stuck with Sunday. I don’t know if Sunday would be his first or last name so maybe I should go with a single name, like Cher, Sting, or God.
Here is the probable first sentence of The Madonna Murder Man, “It was a hot, filthy, and miserable Sunday in Los Angeles, and so was I.”
