Work-In-Progress

I thought I ought to put a blog out there, as I haven’t done anything in that department for a while. The thing is, I’ve been working away at my 2nd novel (as yet untitled) and haven’t actually got around to focusing on a topic for a blog. I’m 30,000 words into the 2nd novel and I’m only just getting going. So, what I’ve decided to do is just give a little taster of this untitled work. As a preface to this teaser excerpt, I should characterise this work as an existential noir: imagine, if you will, Beckett and Faulkner sharing a bottle of whiskey with Dashiell Hammett -the result of their drunken collaboration might look something like the narratorial tone I have come up with. The 1st person narrator is John Fitzgerald Beauregarde, an ex-private detective and a very old man, bed-bound and prone to run off at the mouth:

[Excerpt]
She came the other day, dropping more dead leaves on my spotted sheet. And mixed in with the photos a letter in a cursive hand so faded as to be nigh invisible. She read it to me in her high, reedy voice. The letter told the story of a woman who had lost her husband or whose husband had abandoned her, but the police didn’t see eye to eye with the woman. They were taking the line that she had bumped her old man off, hidden his body somewhere or dissolved it in a vat of hydrochloric acid but they had no proof. Naturally, the woman was more than a trifle distressed. To be accused in such fashion. It was trying on the nerves. It was getting so bad nobody believed there was good in anybody else. Is that right? Is what right? That you would have been the recipient, the first reader as it were, of the letter. You were a private dick, after all. Is that not the case? I was? No, surely not. The very idea. Yes, you were. Don’t you recall a thing about your past? Silence fell. Then I shat myself and cackled loudly. I couldn’t help myself. A dick? Me a dick? I got this picture of myself in a homburg, packing a heater in a shoulder holster under the smooth cut of a double-breasted seersucker. It wasn’t me. It could never have been me. Did I ever use words like ‘angel’ or ‘sugar’? I opened my mouth in a wide grin and showed the full horror of my black, wormy gums. The woman with the voice stopped. I mean, the voice stopped. In mid-sentence. She had just mentioned someone by the name of Brennan and I shat. I fear there may be a Pavolian response in operation here. No certainty, mind. But an hypothesis worth consideration. I shall have to be careful then with the name Brennan. I spoke to Lieutenant Brennan at Police Headquarters oh my God you wretched old man. It took me some moments to grasp that she was referring to me.

 

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