Trying to photocopy moonlight

Detective work wasn't much different than anything else he'd ever done. Pay attention, ask questions, write it up, don't take it personally. Three out of four of those he was even good at. He took a long pull on the grape soda, just held his head back and let it go down his throat without even tasting it. That fake grape taste brought up memories and if he couldn't even afford his own off-brand pop, he certainly wasn't in any position to pay the toll on memories.

The Detective sat back down on his desk. He put his half-empty soda down on a stack of well-thumbed Len Wein/Dave Gibbons issues of Green Lantern comics the Outreach Worker had bought at the Pigeon Park Street Market a few Sundays past. He logged off of his Words With Friends match against a minor memoirist he was a fan of, and got to work updating his LinkedIn profile.

Relax Baby Be Cool

The Detective swished the grape soda around in mouth, enjoying the carbonated tickle on his tongue, feeling the purple sucrose coat his teeth. The Dentist was another old friend he'd have to look up once he got a few cases under his belt. How long had it been?
The last time the Detective had been to see a Dentist was for a root canal. It had been painful and costly enough to keep him flossing for what, four, five years. He'd had a benefit plan then, even.
Now, he had an online diploma in Investigación Privada from a Mexican correspondence school and a business plan sketched out in the margins of a Ross Macdonald paperback: "I could do this. Maybe. Why not?"

I do my best, but I'm made of mistakes

"We should get a record player," the Detective said to his officemates on the third day in a row that his phone didn't ring. Not a telemarketer, not a wrong number, not an old friend who'd seen his ad on the Internet and wanted to find out for themselves if it was true. No calls.
"What do we need a record player for?" asked the Dance Teacher. "I can play anything you want to hear on my computer. Go ahead, pick a song."
"Yeah, but, I've got a computer, too," said the Detective. "That's not the point. I just think, I mean, god, it might be nice, if that's an idea you can understand, it might be nice to have a record player. We could put on records. We could buy some records, some really good ones, to have around the office to put on whenever we felt like it."
"Don't you have a record player at your place?" asked the Outreach Worker. 
"No. Do you have one at yours?"
"I do. Why don't you just get a record player at home? Why have one here?"
"I just thought it would be nice, that's all," said the Detective.
"You want to make this your Man-Cave," said the Dance Teacher, shaking her head. "This is where you come to hide from the world. You want to put in a record player today, tomorrow it's a pinball machine, next week there's a bikini calendar over there on the wall. I'll tell you now, as long as my name's on the lease, that nonsense won't happen here."
The Detective walked over to the white mini-fridge in the corner that the Outreach Worker kept stocked with off-brand cans of soda. Fresh Up, Captain Cola, Dr. Spritz. The Detective chose a Grape Zeal. The Outreach Worker often brought clients back to the office for paperwork or to kill time waiting to hear back from the Ministry. It was only polite to have something cold and sweet to offer them. The Outreach Worker's thriftiness was well-known and occasionally admired. He was no miser. To him, thriftiness was an extension of his generosity, of which the Detective was a constant beneficiary.
"Hey, I've got a Groupon for mussels at the Sandbar," he'd say over the phone. Or "Watermelon was 2-for-1, so I'm bringing one over, okay?"
The Detective made a mental note to pay for the grape soda after business picked up and went back to his desk.

Now you know my middle names are Wrong and Right

He lived with the moustache for a week. From Monday to Monday. "What'd you join the RCMP or something?" they asked him downtown. "Did you, didn't you have a beard?" they asked him around home.
He would forget he wore a ridiculous moustache during the course of his daily tasks only to be reminded by the cocked eyebrows of passers-by.
He'd gained about 30 pounds since the last time he'd been a regular shaver. Mostly in his neck. His beard started going white at age 17. He grew his first sideburns at 13. All his life, he'd used his facial hair to look older. Now he was older. He was old. There was no getting around the passage of time. Now he could use his facial hair to look younger. By getting rid of it.
"What are you, 35 or something?" he asked his freshly scraped face in the mirror, examining the white hairs on his temples, in his eyebrows, up his nose.

He wanted to grow a moustache.

He wanted to grow a moustache because it seemed easier than writing his existential detective novel. And possibly quicker. He grew a moustache because he was an admirer of things that required little more than weeks of patience but could be undone in seconds. He grew a moustache because there were no good movies playing in San Francisco. In fact, he did not so much grow a moustache as he subtracted a beard. He grew a moustache because the bearded phase of his life had to come to an end and he wanted to pretend he could set the terms of change. For his face was a ship too long at the dock, so he believed, and whiskers were barnacles to be scraped away to make her seaworthy again. He recalled a time when his nautical metaphors were inspired by Melville, Dumas & Homer, and not by SpongeBob Squarepants.
He grew a moustache because he wanted to have something in common with his favourite detective novelists. He grew a moustache because he wanted to change how he was seen without changing who he was.
"Oh no," his wife said when she came home from work. "At least trim it."
So he trimmed the parts of his moustache that curled under his top lip and tickled his teeth whenever he spoke. He trimmed the parts of his moustache that distinguished the moustache from all the other moustaches he'd ever grown. He trimmed the parts of his moustache he'd grown in hopes of looking like Paco Ignacio Taibo II, but had to finally admit made him look more like a man who didn't know what he was doing when it came to his own face.

Yes I Guess They Oughta Name A Crime Novel After You

There's been a lot of talk lately, both here on my blog and out in the world, about the intersection of crime fiction and music.
For the most part, I vehemently disagree with Adrian McKinty's argument that Crime Fiction is "the new punk". McKinty is a hell of a writer, though, so I'm willing to listen to whatever he has to say. No kidding, he really is one of the best young* crime fiction writers going right now, and his latest book, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, has a great title, so I think we really oughta hear him out, at least, before we dismiss the idea.
Because he's wrong, of course. We've already established that Crime Fiction is the Country Music of literature. Or possibly the Jazz of Literature. Today I'm leaning more toward Country. And, y'know, in his defence, McKinty's Irish, and I think that, especially for people of his generation, Punk Rock** might be the Irish version of Country Music.
But let me prove my point unequivocally. Take this John Prine song, "Lake Marie", originally released on his 1995 album Lost Dogs & Mixed Blessings, but really, really, you gotta hear it live (or hear a live recording as below) to get it. I first heard it when I saw him in Regina in, um, 2001, I think it was--no, September 6, 2002. I might have heard it before, it sounded kind of familiar, but I'm almost certain I'd never listened to Lost Dogs at that point, having been fairly content to sequester my Prine listening to his first three records. I remember hearing it in 2002, thinking that it didn't really sound like a John Prine Song as I had come to understand John Prine Songs. It had very little of the playfulness I loved about "Dear Abby" or "Spanish Pipedream" or the in-your-face sadness of "Hello In There" or "Souvenirs". It was too subtle for me, then 25, I didn't get it, and wasn't sure if I liked it.

Nearly a decade later, May 5, 2012, I saw John Prine in Vancouver, in a concert hall that may be about to become a megachurch. I went with my dad, who was in town, who had also been to that Regina concert. I had since become a father myself, three times over. The twins had been born the previous fall and I had worked a 12-hour shift the day of the concert, so I was, I don't know, uniquely receptive to what was going on onstage. I fought to stay awake, didn't always keep my eyes open, but even if I slipped into unconsciousness momentarily, I was with the music. Everything is metaphysical when you've got twin infants. At least it feels that way through the fog of fatigue.

I'm not going to pick the song apart for you here, or even get into what, exactly it means to me, but I do want to comment on the Crumley-esque narrative. Particularly the line:

You know what blood looks like in a black and white video? Shadows. 

I love this evocation, this intimation, that shadows are more terrifying, more gruesome than blood. Blood is knowable, blood is definite and often final. Shadows. Country music, at its best, is all shadow. Same for detective fiction.

*He's about ten years older than me, so when I call him a "young writer", I'm trying to say that I'm a really young writer whose best is yet to come.
**I'll give him this, though, Derek Raymond's Factory novels are Punk Rock. Just ask Joyce Carol Oates. 

I dunno, that's when I decided.

The best detective novels are a joke told by an old friend who forgot the punchline but rambles along anyway in case it comes back to him.
— emmet matheson (@emmetmatheson) June 3, 2013

Close enough for a Tweet, anyway. I spend a ridiculous amount of time whittling, editing, compromising, and condensing my original until it met the space restrictions. A truer statement would be more like:

My favourite detective novels read like a joke told by an intimate friend who forgot the details of the set-up but relishes your attention and so rambles on, piling digression on top of digression, spilling everything he knows, ever careful to keep you entertained, in hopes that he'll stumble on to the set-up and eventual punchline. 

Or something like that. The idea was inspired by the first dozen or so pages of The Shape of Water, the first Inspector Montalbano book. I immediately took to Andrea Camilleri's tone as he describes the socio-political circumstances that created the opportunity for the series of events that led to the discovery of the body. Camilleri is clearly a fellow traveller of Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö (particularly their scenes with Kvant and Kristiansson), Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Wolf Haas, and Wayne Arthurson. All of them writers particularly in tune with their setting and not afraid of allowing a bit (or in the case of Haas, a lot) of personality to show through in the narrative. Of the gang I've mentioned, only Arthurson writes in the first person.

In my mind, at least, they are all descended from Georges Simenon--a noted characteristic I'd use to describe two more of my favourite crime writers, K.C. Constantine and Ian Rankin. Reading Constantine last winter, I remarked that Mario Balzic was basically an American Martin Beck. But he can't be--strictly speaking. The first Balzic book, The Rocksburg Railroad Murders came out in 1972, the same year that the seventh book in the Beck series, The Abominable Man, came out in English. It's probably much safer to say that Balzic is an American Maigret in the same way that Beck is a Swedish Maigret.

I haven't read as much Maigret as I'd like. There's only so much time in a day, a week, a year. I read a lot of Maigret (there's a lot of Maigret) when Nicole was pregnant with the twins. I wasn't writing crime novels then. I was working on my picaresque coming of age literary novel. I don't know what it means. But those books spoke to me. Everything I read between the birth of my first daughter and the birth of the twins affected me like nothing before. Richard Price, Taibo, I read a bunch of Paul Auster books, some Miriam Toews (whose A Complicated Kindness I was shamelessly pilfering for my ridiculous 2011 book, Dianne Warren's Cool Water (which bears some distant kinship with Constantine's Rocksburg novels), Sjöwall & Wahlöö, especially Sjöwall & Wahlöö--them and Richard Price was where I realized how much a crime novel could be, and then Taibo showed me it could be even more, and that's when, I dunno, that's when I decided.
Sorry, what was the question?