A washed-up private eye with drinking problems and women problems. My personal expertise kind of ends with the last two categories. About the rest: police procedurals, investigative techniques, I’m still doing the research. And I’m in need of a working plot. No idea where this one is going. But I’m at ease with the protagonist, Cramer, who speaks for the view that everything has gone sour.
Chin squarely on chest, feet up, fedora
pulled down over eyes. The telephone
hasn’t rung in a month. An acrid aura
of old cigarettes and residual gloom
turns everything dingy: desk and chair,
the windows and walls and the very air.
He could do with a solid client, and soon.
Beneath a pint bottle, bottom drawer,
a bundle of unopened bills attests
to the tide of ruin that laps his door.
He dozes, half-hearing the traffic’s drone.
The insolent bluebottle fly that rests
like an ex-wife’s taunt beside the blotter
bestirs him at last. He lifts the swatter.A jangling ring like a detonation
snaps him awake with a violent start.
He lunges, sending the ashtray tumbling
to the tiles… Cramer Investigations,
he snarls into the mouth-piece, scrambling
to rid himself of the fiery spark
that chews a smoldering hole in his pants.
What’s that? . . I doubt it . . couldn’t say Bub . .
no, no . . depends on the circumstances . .
forty-five dollars a day plus expenses,
with a small retainer paid in advance . .
Yeah, likewise . . . He slams the receiver, snubs
the butt to a pulp and, with crossed feet up,
fedora pulled down, returns to his nap.He can see at once she is pure trouble,
leaning sinuously in the open frame
of the office door with that indefinable
feline essence that some women have.
She raises a thin cigarette to lips
that bring to mind a fresh-bitten apple,
scarlet and moist with a poisonous nip.
He rises and flicks a match into flame,
extending it over the desk. She moves
like something they ought to keep behind bars
or let loose in a jungle, crossing the floor
with a smile so slight it is almost grave.
She draws at the flame till her cigarette flares
then with one cool glance she is out the door.It’s sure been a while since a gal of her
indisputably lethal caliber
displayed any interest . . . What is her game?
No seedy down-at-the-heels private eye
as disheveled as he could hope to vie
for the favor of such a dishy dame –
He takes out a Lucky and taps it twice,
then absently shoves it between his teeth
and forgets about it – sure was a nice
little set of attributes underneath
all that shimmer and silk . . . A man passing by
in the hallway just then hears Cramer sigh,
and then the hard clang of a telephone
at which Cramer’s sighing becomes a groan.He takes out the bottle. He takes a hard pull.All the pretty ones get to him anymore,like a hollow ache in the gut. He mullshow strange that she just appeared in the doorfor no reason at all. He doesn’t believein Fate exactly — or maybe he does.If Fate exists, he’s a ornery cusswith a sick sense of humor – time to leave . . .He swallows another. He sits and stares.The telephone jangles, not that he cares.He pushes himself from the desk and standsand steadies himself, and crosses the roomto peer through the blinds — in the evening gloomthe streets are deserted. He feels unmanned.
to be continued . . .
I really like the concept and the possibilities. One thing you might consider is switching the POV from an omnicient narrator to Cramer himself. If you look at the classics, Hammett and Chandler, what you find is that the level of inner intimacy you are attempting is always in the first person:
“There was a sign over the bar. Only Genuine American Pre-War Whiskeys Sold Here. I was trying to count the number of lies I could find in that statement. I had reached five, with promise of more…”
~the nameless Continental Op in one of the short stories in the book of the same name.
It is particularly effective in Red Harvest where the Op’s moral culpability in what is going on, and his growing unease with it, increases chapter by chapter.
When Hammett used the third person, as in The Maltese Falcon, he had to create set pieces of key conversations to slowly develop and motivate the Sam Spade character, and to structure the book around the fact that we really don’t know what Spade is thinking, or whose side he is on, and that the events in the plot give highly mixed signals about that. Hammett was not nearly as successful with the gambler Ned Beaumont in The Glass Key.
It would be extremely difficult, I would think, to build such set pieces in sonnet form.
Chandler never went beyond the first person and that gave him an immense advantage when allowing Marlowe to describe things in a more literary language than usual for a private detective. Part of Marlowe’s character development is the sense that he comes from a better educated background [he does things like replay master level chess matches when at home] and has fallen into the business because of past of hard times. A perfectly plausible thing in the 1930′s
“She didn’t look hard. But she looked like she’d heard all the answers and remembered the ones she thought she could use sometime.” ~Phillip Marlowe in Trouble Is My Business
I suspect that trying to research police procedure won’t help very much. You are clearly attempting to set this in the classic 1920-1950 period (“He takes out a Lucky and taps it twice…”).
Police procedure then was far cruder and quite different than it is now. Not too much more than than finding a likely perp and beating a confession out of him. Really.
You would be better served by trying to sink yourself further into the diction and idiom of the period. “He feels unmanned” is clearly antiquated 19th Century literary diction–the sort of thing you find in Wilkie Collins. What you would want would be something like: “He couldn’t get it up if he tried.”
I think one of the two best resources for this is John Huston’s film of The Maltese Falcon. He transcribed Hammett’s dialog almost verbatim, and it’s even better in the film than it is on the page.
The other would be Robert Mitchum’s voiceover narration in Out Of The Past.
A third source would be Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer and The Air Conditioned Nightmare. And for the early part of the period, John DosPassos’ USA Trilogy.
The early, pre-Production Code, films of the 1930′s, as well:
The Public Enemy, I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, ect.
As to plot, the classic hard-boileds were largely episodic and no more. And, as Chandler himself said, “When things got slow you could always have a man with a gun come through the door.”
What you had was not a plot, but a milleu and a situation: Something unsavory has happened, someone has been murdered, something rare and valuable has been stolen, the rich man’s feckless daughter has been carried off to a Roadhouse for a very consentual laying on of hands, ect.
The protagonist goes places and talks to people. Any or all of them might be lying for any number of reasons. Most of them are lying about something, but not about everything. As the narrative progresses, he keeps finding things like more dead bodies, and keeps poking at things until the web of deceit unravels on its own.
As I say, I find this very exciting and I’m sorry to have written this all the way off the page.
Bradley, I suggest a plot is not needed in order to write a novel or a short story. You need a human thread, a path of events, and it’s not logic or a plot tied up in a neat syllogistic package to be presented as it were a gift of common sense. One s life is not “plotted out” — that’s ridiculous. Write the story out. Get a first draft done, and then step back and see what you have. Richard Ford once quoted Maugham: “There are three rules to writing a good short story, a couple more for a novel. But no one knows what they are.” Write it out, edit without mercy along the way, and the book will reveal itself as a bride when the time comes. Don’t defeat your talent by self-abnegation. Sure, it’s uncertain, but don’t let the monster Doubt take away your gift. — James Naiden 12 March 2012 Minneapolis