My detective

The program cost several thousand dollars so it wasn’t something to be entered into lightly. The idea was, if you followed each step, you would come away with a finished manuscript. A novel. They took you through the whole process: plot, setting, characters. Step-by-step.

And everything was going singingly until my mentor/editor told me to lose the detective character. When I heard this I was completely confused and disheartened. A great deal of the plot rested squarely on this character's shoulders by way of narrative exposition so tossing him out did not seem like a particularly good idea.

You are mixing genres in an ineffectual way, said my Mentor, a middle-aged writer named Gretchen Harper, looking at her notes on a large computer monitor.

I met up with Gretchen once a month. Gretchen was buried away in the English department of the local University, in a tiny cramped office with no natural light. A space made all the more cavernous by the ribbed columns of books and papers that climbed the walls and lined the bookshelves.
I know, I know, I said but.....there is a meta thing going on here...I mean, that's my intention anyway, my voice taking on a defensive edge.

I wanted to nest stories from my grandfather's wartime diary inside a contemporary piece of fiction which in turn would be further contextualised inside a tawdry detective narrative. That was my big idea. What I thought would turn out to be a clever Russian doll narrative structure. A mixture of high and low writing styles.

I hate to break it to you, said Gretchen Harper, her own voice becoming weary, but this is a very....overused strategy. I assume you have heard of Postmodernism? Calvino? Borges? Auster? More recently that David Michelle fellow? Did you read his novel? Cloud Atlas? He did a good job with this kind of gimmickry, with exactly what you are attempting to do now. And he was borrowing from writers such as Calvino and Sorrentino and Umberto Eco. My point is, this has been done to death. And personally, I find it all rather self-severing. My advice to you is….strive for something true and clear. And definitely crawl before you walk. Yes? What I am saying is learn how to pull off well-written, no-nonsense prose before you try to pass yourself off as an innovator. I don't mean to sound condensing (but she was. Christ, she could barely help it) but at the heart of it all, I feel all this skittering around is indicative of a writer without a real story to tell and in a broader sense, clearly highlights the jumpy, superficial disposition of our digital age. It is the kind of tactic that suggests a rather shallow interest in the world. An unwillingness to commit to deeper thinking. My advice to you? Get the basics down before you attempt to bend the rules. And lose the bloody detective. He stands out like a sore thumb.

My pride was injured. I thought I was onto something original. I honestly assumed I would receive praise for my unconventional plot construction. I was learning this is the main hurdle when dealing with academics. They force you to your knees, to pay tribute to all the old men and women entombed in the crumbling volumes on their bookshelves. Despite these feelings, I decided to remain open to constructive criticism, to trust in Gretchen Harper's judgment. Otherwise, what was the point of doing this thing in the first place?

I edited out the detective. I went back to work, reworking my manuscript, bringing my grandfather’s story to the forefront while sealing up the wounds to continuity left behind in the detective character's absence. I kept on track, following the weekly emailed steps of the program. And even though I knew I should be concentrating on the work at hand, on the novel I was slowly building from the ground up, through a carefully controlled series of drafts, the detective character wouldn’t completely go away. He amounted to little more than maybe 10,000 words including notes but he was more alive in the wings of my imagination than the prose he had been ejected from.

So throughout this period, while I was slogging my way through my novel, not to mention work and all the other things I needed to do, my detective lived an invisible life that ran parallel to mine own. He existed in a zone which at times merged with my world. I saw him in the cockroach scuttled rooms that flashed past the train window near Central station, in rough pubs, in the subways, in rundown hotels, at the racetrack and in the abandoned areas of the city. My fictional detective had been left high and dry without a plot to propel him forward, to give him agency. He had had nothing to do but lament his existence. After all, what can a detective do without a plot? Nothing. Especially a fictional detective who relies heavily on external events to motivate and carry him along. Without a crime to solve, this kind of character exists in a state of suspended animation. At best, all he can do is haunt the urbanscape while providing a staccato, wisecracking commentary on the state of his existence. In our imaginary conversations, my detective kept saying, kid...for god sake's….get me a case. Something to get my teeth into, my fingernails dirty. An extortion, a robbery, a kidnapping....anything! I’d settle for a goddamn Jaywalking ticket.
Mate, I'm busy, I’d say….with the novel…
Yeah, yeah, yeah...I know….the novel. The damn novel you kicked me out of…
We discussed this. I had to...remove you.
I'm a detective kid. I need something to do….otherwise, what do I got? Nothing...Look me. I’m stuck in a god damn Luigi Pirandello play. All that arty-farty shit. It’s not me. I don't want to wait around, contemplating my existence....I want action. I need action. I am a man of action.
I know. I know. I wish I could help you.....
Just get me into something simple. I don't care...something derivative. Rip-off Chandler if you need to. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about?....'Chapter one: It was Monday morning. A beautiful dame walked into my office.…' Like that….nice and simple. One thing leading to another....I don't know....maybe into a simple extortion case maybe involving....sordid photographs!
No, that won't work. It's too dated. Most people are the stars of their own porn these days….
Well, come up with something more….contemporary. I don't know….you’re the writer.
Look….I told you, I just don’t have time. What with work and all my other shit I have to do these days...I can’t write two novels. There is no way. There just aren't enough hours in the day.
Well, drop the family memoir thing and help me out….after all, you invented me….

And on it would go, our conversations taking on a life of their own. And the more I tried not to think about the detective, the more he appeared in my thoughts. Meanwhile, I continued to work away on the novel even when my enthusiasm waned. I knew I had to stay the course. Changing horse mid-stream would get me nowhere.

My detective character was partially based on my uncle Wallace who was a sort of larger-than-life figure in our family. The stories of his exploits in different countries would filter back through conversations over the dinner table. I knew my father envied his brother. My father would always talk about Wallace in this judgmental way, describing his life abroad as irresponsible and reckless. Over the years there had been mention of being part owner of a bar in Tokyo, having a wife in Brazil and the years when he'd become a motivational speaker in North America. And it was understood that whatever financial or legal issues my uncle Wallace created for himself, he was always managed to maneuver his way out of trouble and back to safety. Most people have a soft spot for a scoundrel especially if he has a modicum of charm, which my uncle certainly did have. My father, on the other hand, did not possess the same charm or entrepreneurial spirit. My father had chosen a more stable, responsible route in life and the older he got the more these safe choices ate away at him. Reduced risk meant a reduced chance of adventure and freedom. This didn’t stop Dad from admonishing his absent brother around the dining table. Year after year this went on.

There will come a day when the showgirls and the limos (somewhere along the line there had literally been a photograph of uncle Wallace surrounded by a squad of statuesque showgirls, getting out of stretch limo) are gone, he will find himself a lonely old man. You mark my words. My father actually said things like mark my words. Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that my detective was an amalgamation of Uncle Wallace and several other people I knew, including my high school English teacher.

Eventually, I managed to finish my novel. It turned out to be an anti-climatic moment. Although my novel ticked all boxes, it was a flaccid effort. Words on a page. So while it worked in a technical sense, it had no life. No spark. And as far as I was concerned the reason for this was Gretchen Harper. I could clearly identify Gretchen Harper's heavy-handed influence from the first page all the way through to the epilogue. My two thousand bucks (conveniently spread out over 24 monthly payments) had earned me what exactly? I'll tell you what. It had given me the opportunity to bash and mould my little story into Gretchen Harper's monster. For two years I'd allowed my strings pulled. I had blindly accepted her criticism while denying my own gut instincts. And this was the result.

And really, at the end of the day, who exactly was Gretchen Harper? I mean, really? She was a collection of literary cliches. Her dingy office overstuffed with books and papers. The rumpled clothing, the nicotine yellowed fingers and teeth, the knee-jerk defensive aloofness masked as intellectual superiority. It only occurred to me after the fact that her first and only published novel was always conveniently at hand, a prop she would refer to as 'oh that old thing....', pretending it to be a nuisance, shoving it out of the way with exaggerated annoyance because conveniently it always seemed to be in the way.

A few years after I'd shelved the idea of becoming a writer, I happened to be flipping through the Sunday supplement and I came across a photograph of Gretchen Harper staring back at me from the Arts section. It was quite a shock because physically she had been transformed. The rumpled outer exterior and bad poster were gone. Instead, she looked magnificent aligned and smart in a tailored blazer, her hair cut into a sharp grey bob. The article itself was part feature profile and part book review.

My shock deepened as I came across the real revelation. In the intervening years since we'd spoken, Gretchen had not slipped off into obscurity as I had assumed she would. No. She had come good. She had revitalised her career. She had written a series of highly popular crime novels.  In one of the article's quotes Gretchen said, I left conventional fiction behind and began dabbling in genre fiction. I lost the all the arrogance I had developed towards supposedly 'low forms' of fiction. I decided to test myself in a forum that had a substantial audience. I wanted to see if I could work within a set of well-established conventions and if I had the courage to stop existing in a vacuum. I wanted to see if I had the right stuff to succeed.

As I read on, I discovered her latest book was the third in a series centered around her detective protagonist Nate Timbers. The third instalment! I do not read much fiction these days so it was understandable that I had missed her first two books, both of which had sold very well here and in other parts of the world. And now that she had established her readership, she was primed up to pump out one book a year. There was talk of a movie adaptation as well. In humble contrast to all this excitement, Gretchen went on to described the predictability of her writing process, how she would relocate to her beach house one hour south of Sydney. Once out of Sydney’s bumper-to-bumper rat race, she worked steadily for 6. 5 hours a day. She sat in her study overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a pot of herbal tea at the ready. She listened to music. Instrumental music only. She could not tolerate verbal disruptions.

I am blessed, she was quoted saying. Mainly, what I do for the first draft is follow Nate around. He is such a vivid character that all I really need to do is leave him to his own devices and follow him through the underbelly of the city. I employ an assistant to help me with the research once the basic plot has been hammered out. This is contentious in some quarters, I know, but show me the rule book that says a writer must do all her own research. I don't buy this. As I said, I mainly act as a conduit, following Nate around, capturing his voice. His rough essence and perspective. I consider my relationship with my protagonist to be a collaboration. Nate just came to me, she said. He was a gift. He changed my life.

Oh yes. Big changes. Gretchen now had an ex-model as a wife, a beautiful woman, a decade and a half younger than she was. They had adopted a child from the Philippines and apart from the beach house down in Coalcliff, they had recently purchased a renovated terrace house in the city, in Surry Hills.

The character is quintessentially Australian, a bastion of the old values, continued Gretchen. The greatest challenge for me was working with a character who is so counter to my nature, so diametrically opposed to the kind of person I am. I see this man as someone who is externally assaulted on every front by changing values of society and I like this tension. Also, as someone who is sharply delineated as both a good and bad character, the reader never know which direction Nate will take you in. I like this kind of internal and external tension.

Further on in the article, Gretchen described herself a bit of an old sponge, drawing in everything around her, greedily extracting the raw materials for her writing from her environment.
I read her first two novels. Her detective was undoubtedly my detective. The similarities were undeniable. The same physical type, the same way of speaking and thinking. Right down to the same kind of mannerisms. I thought back on all the conversations Gretchen and I had, how she had basically been waiting in her little office, a dried up spider in a dusty trap, waiting for a juicy morsel to come her way. Creatively she had been running on fumes up until that point, the fumes of her one and only novel. Then I appeared. Admittedly, I didn’t have a novel in me. Or put more accurately, I didn't have a very good novel within me. I did, however, have a character. The detective. Fuelled by all those stories about my uncle Wallace. All the boozing and gambling. Life on the road less traveled. Risk and reward. The truth was he died alone in a small beach-side apartment in Vietnam. He had a heart attack. His girlfriend, a bar girl twenty-five years his junior, couldn’t revive him. But before this happened, his life had come back to us. Stories that undermined our suburban smugness. Stories that made all those bland meals and nights when the house was full of stupor educing television programs seem all the more stagnant.

I went down to the house in Coalcliff. This much I remember. There was no one there. A dark empty house, an empty double garage. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was expecting. It wasn’t difficult to break in. I kicked out a small glass window pane on the deck. As I walked across the open plan living room, I saw my detective reflected in the black sliding glass doors. He was dressed in a robe, a drink in his hands. He looked fat, neutered. I’ve become entertainment for old people, he muttered with disdain. Boomers. This means I have developed a ‘heart of gold’ appeal. She keeps me down in the dungeon of her orderly, little mind. It's like a laboratory maze and I'm the test rat. She lets me out once in a while. Why'd ya do it kid? I implored you to focus on me. You wouldn’t listen. You ignored me.

Outside the waves crashed against the shore. I sat there for a long time. I talked to the detective, my detective, while he sipped a drink in a thick glass tumbler that never needed replenishing. Sometime later I heard the garage door open. A vehicle pull in. Now what? I wondered. I don’t remember going into the kitchen but somehow I got the jump on Gretchen when she came in through the connecting door. She had some shopping. Gretchen realised the gravity of her situation immediately, that someone had broken into her house, an old face from the past. Someone whom she had ripped off. Clever girl that she is, Gretchen started talking, playing with the history of things. Trying to convince herself (along with me) that her version of events was innocent. Yes, the innocent acquisition of a rudimentary idea which she had built up and refined into something tangible.

How did this weapon come to be in my hand? First, there was a kitchen knife with a perforated rubber grip, flashing in the air between myself and Gretchen Harper who now looked terrified. No, wait, that’s not right because the knife suddenly became a gun, all black and sleek, like black tar squeezed out of my closed fist, solidifying into an ugly snub-nosed object. All I was trying to do was explain my feelings, what it was like to be betrayed by this woman, my certainty that she had stolen and profited from my personal history. From my life.

The problem was everything keeps lurching forwards without proper explanation because now Gretchen was gagged and bound on the living room floor and I was standing over her shouting. And the room was a mess with books, broken glass and overturned furniture scattered across the floor.
You can work yourself into a corner. You don’t know it until it’s too late and that was the problem with this whole Gretchen situation. Who said, hell is discovering the truth too late? I can't remember. Time slipped forward again. Bang! Gretchen was now bound in the trunk of the car in the garage. How had this happened? And why?

Now I turned and slipped in a greasy puddle of blood, my foot sliding out with a terrible squeak as I fell over, cracking my ribs against the kitchen counter top. Where did all this blood come from? Everything I touched, I was spreading the fast congealing mess, leaving fresh red hand and sneaker prints on the kitchen floor, on the cabinets and on the walls. There was blood everywhere.
Where was Gretchen? I ran out to the garage but the truck of the car was empty, the interior alarm going ding! Ding! Ding! Just the smell of new upholstery.

Things were moving way too fast now. Where did the gun go? I looked down at my hand and the gun appeared again, black and yawning, still plump with a belly full of live ammunition. But then, no, then it was gone, replaced by the kitchen knife. Then a tyre iron. Then a series of sharp and blunt force objects strobing in and out of existence.

And why couldn't I find Gretchen Harper? Or remember what I did to her? All the details keep slipping away yet I know, I know, I did something terrible. In every night blackened window, the detective was looking on. A fat man in white towelling robe.

Said Gretchen Harper: This is where the breakdown occurred. Like many people, his imagination was too spoon-feed to make the whole thing run in a logical way. It must have been like a film unspooling in his head. He had a loose collection of ideas but it takes hard work to make those ideas work in the context of a story. As I have always maintained, this Snap Chat generation have been given these marvelous creative tools that we never had and they expect their every utterance, no matter how insignificant, to be a work of art. As if creativity is their birthright. In my experience, they don’t want to deal with the tedious business of thinking through ideas and linking those ideas together. Paint a picture, shoot a movie, write a novel: these are incredibly taxing activities. Inspiration is not enough. You need to keep going even when the bloody inspiration abandons you. This is why literature is doomed and the real reason I opted to work in genre fiction. Why kill yourself trying to write a work of literature that no one will read? What is the point?

Continued Gretchen Harper after taking a sip of wine, her guests leaning in to catch the rest of the story: Anyway, there really wasn’t much more to it. I mean the newspaper made such a big deal out of the whole thing because that is what the media does. Blow everything up. Drama. Herod and victims. He broke in. That’s all. He was right here, in the kitchen, sitting in the dark, mumbling on about how I had plagiarised his idea for a character. A character based on his uncle or father. Preposterous. Anyway, he was very upset and confused. The police think he had been living here for a week at least, while Kerrie and I had been in the States promoting my book. You could see the place was a mess. I just talked to him, trying to calm him down, trying to get his mind back into the reality of the situation. I was a bit worried….at first….that he might actually do something crazy so I concentrated on keeping the situation as calm as possible while Kerrie went outside and called the police.

This is the problem with some of your more devoted fans, you see? They personalise the work to such an extent that it becomes part of their lives. Lines get blurry. And this guy, who I think had written a bit of obsessive fan fiction based on Nate Timbers, had claimed ownership of my character. My detective. They found out later he even created a backstory explaining how I’d worked as a university lecturer, how I’d mentored him. This fabrication provided a credible opportunity for me to hijack his idea. Of course, I have never worked at a university. I’ve always maintained that academic side work is the first indication your literary career is seriously in trouble.

Anyway, it was all very sad. The police came and took him away and that was basically it. He was too disorientated to be a threat. I pitied the poor man. I mean sure, he'd ruined a few things in my nice house but so what? These are just things. I make a living generating stories. It has provided me with a life. A life full of nice things. My stories entertained people but what have they done for him? They had unbalanced him.

He writes letters to me from time-to-time. I was advised by my lawyer to have these letters stopped but he’s not going to be released anytime soon. He writes in the voice of my detective. It’s a bit weird but what can you do? In his more lucid moments, he tells me that he is lost in a white rat maze of compromised memory.