I don’t know about you, but I’ve
got a thing about process — not so much what I do but more the way I do
it. Bet that sounds odd coming from a
guy with a short fuse and bad attitude; especially since I don’t think of my
cases as police procedurals. I rely far
too much on hunches and instinct, and also harbor an unhealthy disregard for
anyone’s rules but my own. That blatant
disregard for authority — and an occasional leap into the abyss — cost me my
job as a detective with the NYPD, so I’m not known for my methods any more than
I am for my patience. I’m very much a
bottom-line kind of guy.
Through it all, though, it’s
still about process. Process, in fact, is
what has prevented me from making more entries in this journal; I’ve been
struggling to keep my head straight — and still attached to my shoulders — in a
bizarre case boasting a rising body count, an ancient blood curse and one of
the most dangerous Femme Fatales this side of our Lady From Shanghai, Elsa
Bannister. I’ve had my hands full, in
more ways than one, and haven’t had much time for sidebars.
So by process I mean my general approach
to what I do. When I begin a case, for
example, I use the cork board panels in my study to literally throw shit on a wall. There’s no order, no angles, no
presumptions, no nothing: just the facts, ma’am, as Joe Friday of Dragnet
might say; except since I have doubts about our ability to firmly establish
facts of any kind its interpretations or quirky details that I’m really
after. Everything gets pinned to the wall
— photos, character profiles, insurance policies, riders and inventories, newspaper
clippings, downloads pulled out of the ether, sticky notes inscribed with stickier
questions or scraps of paper with hunches scribbled under coffee stains — all pieces
to a giant jigsaw puzzle that I’m supposed to fit together. What am I looking for? A point of entry into the case, the one sliver
of evidence, a suspicion — yes, even a hunch—that quantifies and illuminates
all the others.
Observers might note that my
process is curiously similar to that of my creator’s, because it is. He’s been prone to use cork boards to stitch
my literal storyboards together, and he struggles to find that point-of-entry
into his writing the same way I do my cases.
Author-dearest doesn’t take ‘write what you know’ all that seriously,
but he doesn’t totally disregard it, either.
Solving a case—or writing a
story—isn’t as easy as sometimes advertised.
Facts and/or interpretations can often fit together in disparate ways,
and in my case there are usually one or more characters fiercely determined to obscure
what’s really going on because, for them, it’s very much a zero-sum game. For me to win they have to lose. To make matters worse, I’m usually playing
with only 51 cards in the deck — not me, mind you, I’m playing with far fewer
than that — but there’s usually some vital
detail or innocuous clue either withheld or misrepresented that lures me down
dark alleys and dead ends.
That probably explains why my
navigator and back seat driver, author-dearest, is the one armed with GPS. He usually
knows where I’m going before I get there. He
says it’s because he has to make sure that all the pieces fit together and make
sense — no small feat considering the convoluted crap I step in. Being as hardheaded as I am hardnosed I
don’t have much use for road maps, but just because I have broad shoulders and
wear the chip on mine better than author-dearest does the one on his doesn’t
mean I’m ungrateful.
I find it touching that someone
has my back, makes sure loose ends aren’t left dangling and mitigates the
damage when I screw up—which pretty much is all the time. I try to return the favor whenever possible,
but that could prompt the question of exactly who’s writing who?
Talk about your mysteries…
