My author thinks he knows all about me, but in truth he doesn’t know shit. Oh, he can write a decent game on occasion and turn a catchy phrase now and again, and he does try his best to come up with nasty predicaments for me to get myself out of, but in a way that’s exactly my point. When push comes to shove it’s not his ass that’s on the line, taking a beating. He’s sitting safely at his computer, listening to Miles and poking out a four-fingered tune on his keyboard while I’m locked in mortal combat with an endless parade of psycho heavies hell-bent on doing me harm.
But it’s all right. I don’t begrudge the guy who writes me his cushy back seat. Hell, that’s why he created me; to go where he doesn’t, say what he can’t, do things normal folk only dream of. I’m the badass instrument of his bizarre sense of order, the fearless front man to his anger who insists that justice be done. That seldom happens in the so-called real world --- less and less all the time from what I see and hear --- so allow me to rant and ramble in the hope the right scores are being settled and the appropriate piles of bullshit are being offered on the menu. It’s a necessary relief for someone who lives on the edge and doesn’t have much margin for error. A fictional character has got to slip out of his skin once in a while and get out from under his author’s ink-stained thumb to keep sane. Besides, what does any author really know about the characters he brings to life on the page? Does he write us, us him, or are we all really writing one another?
Such are my quiet ruminations while sitting in my Greenwich Village study staring at wall-length cork boards that, aided by an occasion cigarette and glass of single malt scotch, come alive. At least that’s the general idea of what happens when I’m lucky. To these cork board walls are pinned the puzzles that are my cases: a photo here, a flimsy lead there, a frail, orphaned hunch that I need to run down stuck off to the side like a footnote. Police reports, insurance policies and their related inventory catalogs and other assorted tidbits arranged in no particular order. I try to determine which, if any, has some meaningful relationship to another, and begin to build on that; one piece at a time. I sift through the detritus left behind by others, examine the abandoned shards and discarded remains, make note of their peculiar shape and composition and put that info in cold storage as I move on to the next hunch, the next piece of garbage in hope of solving a much larger puzzle.
My author would probably say the wall is a metaphor for writing, and he’d probably have a valid point. Even he has a good idea every once in a while, so let’s not be too critical of him. He would go further, of course — he often does — and say that is his way of stepping into the living world he’s creating; breathing the same air, wearing the same skins, seeing the same colors as his characters in his quest to fully animate them. Like me, or am I mimicking him — I’m horribly conflicted on this point — he picks up one piece of the puzzle at a time, tests, probes and polishes it until he Goldilocks his way to find the one that’s ‘just right!’. Like a painter using colors to paint a mood or feeling or a jazz musician using the opening bars as a springboard into the interior of the riff being played, that one piece soon connects with another, then another, as if cerebral Lego's, and these constructs in turn become his beachhead onto which he lands boatloads of plot lines and characters and employs a host of devices and technical sleights of hand to build the story's spine and structure. That initial impetus in turn propels him and, ultimately us, towards that inexorable end looming ahead in the distance.
Rumor has it that’s the way I was created. I say ‘rumor’ because I wasn’t present at my creation. The truth can be a painful thing, and the embarrassing bitch about it is that I was an afterthought, a new character grafted onto a preexisting story and belatedly cast in the starring role. Maybe that’s why Kane can’t stand my guts! I wasn’t in the original short story, Abraxas that formed the basis of the full-length adventure Portrait of Deadly Excess. Daniel Kane was the central figure who dominated the action despite never being an actual, active participant in the tale. Just his kind of mind fuck! He sprung to life through the fevered Conradian flashbacks within flashbacks of David Latimore, an overly-ambitious young artist who harbored a twisted artistic obsession of his idol, Kane. Curtis Huntington was their mutual manager, and Latimore told his bizarre tale to the ambitious reporter, Karen Greene.
Where was I? Not even the proverbial gleam in my author’s eye!
Mine was a different dawn, born of a writer’s germinating interest in creating a character he could use again and again in a series of different adventures. Parts of me, of course, have roots in the broader hard-boiled tradition: the resourcefulness of Spade, the wisecracking toughness of Marlowe, and the unrelenting attitude of Hammer, the demons-in-the-closet of Holmes, even the humorous edge to grisly violence of Gravedigger and Coffin Ed. I’m even man enough to admit to having a trace of feminine DNA in my makeup. The character of Vicki Anderson from the original film, The Thomas Crown Affair — the one played by Faye Dunaway — served as prototype for my being a high flying, stylish insurance freelancer who works largely on instinct.
Stir them together and you almost have me. Almost. I’ve always suspected isolated chromosomes here and there only explain so much. Like all our features, it’s really the way those chromosomes and traits are put together and influence one another that makes us who and what we are. Social engineering is every bit as important as genetics in shaping that. My world was painted black on one side and white on the other, in black and white striped pattern, but the lines of distinction never quite held and daily melted into a hazy gray. Suffice it to say that it didn’t take me long to see that neither extreme had a monopoly on intelligence or stupidity, poverty or wealth, wisdom or foolishness. I also saw that, no matter how much I’d try, none of my friends and no one in my family beyond my parents accepted me wholeheartedly into their ranks. They all said they did, of course, and tried to put on an embracing face, but there was always a bitter edge to their syrupy welcome that made me suspicious. What do the Temptations caution us about Smiling Faces Sometimes? There was nothing genuine in their embrace, except perhaps their fear of me and what I represented to them. I was a freak, a multi-racial, multi-ethnic abomination that reminded them that some dared to break the rules they so stubbornly clung to. I was a stranger, not of their body, not of their kind, and so became something alien and alarming, not to be welcomed or encouraged. I would be left to fail by virtue of my own alienation and estrangement, a warning to others not to break the same, age-old prejudices and taboos.
I’m not sure exactly when I started to piss in their faces to display my disappointment and displeasure, but piss in them I did, and do. In short I refused to choose. Like my father, the loner detective with the NYPD and my mother, who cultivated a new career for herself as a writer so she could home school me, I saw no compelling reason to choose one extreme, one identity, one world over the other. We defiantly straddled them both, defended both, and we’re all still standing.
In my case it took a while for me to gain my bearings as a fictional character. My pedigree was too much of the hardass strain on both sides. I seem to have made a career out of doing things the hard way. It took me time to become who I am, and so I was put in mothballs; a character abandoned while still rudely stamped, to paraphrase misshapen Richard III, cheated of feature and left unfinished to wallow in a dusty file folder to age and ripen.
And age I did, like a wheel of cheese, while my author was off breathing life into other characters in other stories. Fortunately, I'm not the jealous type, but I am a persistent bastard. Just ask any one of the characters I track down in my cases. I was genetically-engineered as an offbeat pit bull, a volatile protagonist admittedly as flawed and as dark as any villain. You’ve got to pay attention and look real close to tell the difference between me and the bad guys. Usually, there’s barely a spits worth of difference between me and the characters I hunt.
Both the guy who writes me and I like it that way. It’s only fitting that you have some skin in this game, too.
