He studied me.
“AndReal Rob?” I said. “Some weird show about Rob Schneider’s life? That’s the kind of TV you think I want to watch?”
“You like reality TV.”
“I like bad reality TV. And there’s bad reality TV andbadreality TV.”
“You watched four hours ofUltimate Beastmasteryesterday. You told me it was, quote, ‘Ninja Warriormeets Sylvester Stallone’s abominable brainchild.’”
“Bobby, that’s a competition. It’s—it’s a demonstration of ability. There are feats of strength.”
“And there’s that guy whose shorts always slip and you can see his Hollister underwear.”
Ladies and gentlemen: Igasped.
“Okay,” Bobby said, “I’m going to work now.”
“That is—I can’t—howdareyou?”
“Feel free to change it toUltimate Beastmasterafter I leave.”
And he left before I could offer my stinging rebuttal (that I was still working on).
Also, for the record, I didnotchange it toUltimate Beastmasterafter he left.
(And in my defense, the guy with the Hollister underwear wasswinging on a rope, for frick’s sake. I’m not made of stone.)
I tried to get intoReal Rob.I really did. I ate cake. I drank coffee. I did my best to slip into the semi-hypnotized, dissociated state that junk TV usually induces. (It’s the cure for what ails ya.)
But I couldn’t. In part, because my brain kept looping back to September in that tiny camper, and the smell of vomit, and howpale she’d been. How hard she’d been trying to reach Foster. The same woman who hadn’t gone to the sheriff’s station when Keme, her own son, had been arrested because she’d been afraid it would look bad.
And in part because something was still nagging at me about Foster. I knew he was a bad guy. I knew he used women. I even believed, after seeing him with September, that he wasn’t above hurting a woman. But that he’d killed JT, and then Channelle, for money?
I mean, yes. It was possible. It was even believable.
So why didn’t I believe it?
Eventually, I gave up on TV and dragged myself into the den. I got myself settled at the computer. I did a quick check ofCrime Cats(there was a stunning exposé on this little gray kitten that was “illegally smol,” and let me tell you: it was Pulitzer-worthy stuff), and then, somehow, it was forty-five minutes later, and I told myself Ihadto write.
The only problem was that I didn’t know what.
I had my plot. Ish. Will Gower was looking for his—well, whatever it was. And he was going to find it. Or not. And something bad was going to happen. Or something good. I basically had it locked down. I was definitely thinking Vancouver. Unless I was missing a real opportunity with Portland so close to me.
The real problem was the relationship side of the story. I knew I wanted something complex, something like Hammett, a tangle of desire and love, selfishness and selflessness. But I didn’t want it to beexactlylike Hammett. I guess I could have just gayed upThe Maltese Falcon. Brigid could become, um, Bridger (see? this is why they pay me the big bucks). And he could be beautiful and seductive, a master manipulator of men, only to fall in love with Will Gower and then, um, betray him? I guess.
But as I said, I didn’t wantexactlythat. What I wanted was that same tangled messiness, but with my own spin on it.
Twisty—and twisted—relationships were a hallmark of the mystery genre. The Golden Age mysteries, for all their supposedly stout, staid reserve, were actually full of them. Agatha Christie’sThe Mysterious Affair at Styleswas a good example. (Spoilers incoming.) The murder victim, Emily Inglethorp, is married to a much younger man, who appears to be a gold digger. (Apparently, a gold digger used to be called a fortune hunter.) She has stepsons from her first marriage who are also hoping to inherit her fortune. And she has a companion (which is apparently what single ladies did back then—good work if you can get it) named Evelyn, who supposedly hates Alfred, and who does her best to convince Poirot and the others that Alfred killed Emily. Thesupposedlyprobably gives it away, but it turns out that Evelyn and Alfred are secretly in love, and they conspired together to kill Emily.
Daphne du Maurier’sRebeccawas another good example. (More spoilers!) For a good portion of the book, the protagonist—and the reader—are convinced that Mr. de Winter (the unnamed protagonist’s husband) is still desperately in love with his deceased first wife, Rebecca. It turns out, though, that he hated Rebecca. (Frankly, with good cause—she was unfaithful, cruel, and a bit of a psychopath.)
Noir fiction had its own share of it too. Raymond Chandler’s most intricately plotted book,Farewell, My Lovely, revolves around two obsessive relationships. (Spoilers!!!) The book opens with poor Philip Marlowe getting dragged along as ex-felon Moose Malloy goes on a (literal) rampage looking for the girl he left behind when he went to prison, Velma Valento. Then Marlowe gets involved in a separate, and seemingly unrelated, case involving the beautiful (and promiscuous) Mrs. Grayle, who is being blackmailed. (Also, she’s a blonde, which is athingfor Chandler.) It turns out—big surprise—that Mrs. GrayleisVelma Valento. She’s also unfaithful, treacherous, and a bit of a psychopath herself.
Boiled down like that, all the plots seem superficial and obvious and lackluster. But that’s not doing them justice. When you read them, when you were living out the story word by word along with the protagonist, they were engrossing, almost claustrophobically enveloping, placing you in the center of the web of lies and half-truths that the protagonists were struggling to unravel. More than anything, when you read them, you felt the power of those messy emotions: people who loved and hated deeply, passionately, secretly, in ways that weren’t neat and nice and proper. Maybe that, more than anything, was at the heart of crime fiction: the belief that the human heart was wild, untamable, always burning. That love, as the ancients thought of it, was a disease.
What I really liked about these stories though? In all of them, a character you thought was good (or the victim)—Brigid, Emily, Rebecca, even Mrs. Grayle—turned out to be much more complicated. And their relationships, with each other and with the protagonist, were never what they seemed.
So, I knew what I wanted. I just didn’t know how to do it.
