In The Beginning Was The Word - Prologue
“What got me into the detective business? That’s easy. Elementary, even, to use the term oft-misattributed to Holmes.
The books.
It was always about the books. I ran the gamut from Encyclopedia Brown to the Hardy Boys to Sherlock Holmes, devouring all of it I could get my hands on. By the time I was 12, there was nothing Doyle had written that I hadn’t read, at least regarding the Great Detective. I couldn’t give a shit about his dinosaur stories. And then there was Batman. Fucking Batman. World’s Greatest Detective. When the right people wrote his scripts, and remembered that intellect was his whole schtick, and not stupid gadget-of-the-week gags made so popular by Adam West, then Batman belonged right up there in the Detective Pantheon with the rest. Hercule Poirot and Auguste Dupin…I could go on for hours. These fictional men were my gods, dig? And the best part about it? If I could make myself smart enough, I could become them.
I picked up my first Encyclopedia Brown book at a fair in third or fourth grade. Paid something like two bucks for it. I’ve still got it at home somewhere, along with the rest of the series. See, with the Brown mysteries, all the clues were in the story. If you read carefully and had the head for it, you could solve the mystery yourself. I agonized over some of them for days, tempted to peak at the solution in the back, but all the time knowing that my detective idols would never have become legends if they did that, so I fought the temptation and persevered. Solved them all, eventually. Looking at them now, they’re all kind of obvious, but shit, I was eight. Logic doesn’t come easy at eight.
Of course, when I got into Doyle and Dixon, the clues weren’t in place, which was a great disappointment to me at that age. Denied the chance to solve the mysteries, I switched my focus to methods. Based on the books’ description, I assembled a fingerprint kit like the Hardy Boys used. I amassed a reference library covering as many subjects as I could manage. My parents saw me asking for chemistry books at 12 years old and figured I just wanted a jump on high school, so they never asked many questions. I did get one outright refusal, but in fairness I don’t think I would have bought a 12-year-old a book on forensics, if I had been in their place. I devoured everything I could get my hands on, in as broad an array as I and my tiny school library could manage.
In high school I came across the other side of the detective fiction coin — hard-boiled stories from Spillane, McBain, Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammet…all those guys. The cigarettes and black coffee and bourbon and snub-nosed .38 revolvers. Grim men, deadly women, and hard luck. I began to suspect that being successful as a detective outside the tidy idealized world of Doyle or Christie was going to involve becoming hard, but at that point had little clue how one went about doing it. Especially when one was a pasty bookworm that rarely went outside. So I went out for sports, because all the noir guys were in good shape…football was a total bust, as I was too slow and too small, but I did OK with track, despite having acquired a nicotine habit. I signed up for the judo club at school, and learned just enough to know it would get my ass kicked if I ever tried to use it. Then I started picking fights. Nothing too much, really. Just rising to the bait when some lunkhead wanted to give the skinny underclassman some shit. I got pounded routinely, but I learned how to manage myself in a dustup and how to keep moving when I was hurt.
College took me eight years because I couldn’t settle into a major. I dabbled in psychology, criminal justice, sciences of several stripes, logic…the works. When the debt load started looking too nasty, I closed out an English degree and graduated. Books. Always it’s about the books.
After that I worked whatever job gave me a decent paycheck with minimal effort, and started freelancing as a bail bondsman and private eye. Bullshit divorce cases, mostly, and DUI offenders that wanted to skip out so they didn’t have to do their 60 days in the county lockup. But both angles gave me contacts, and that’s what I needed most. It also gave me a decent look into the legal system in practice, as opposed to the theory I got lots of in my criminal justice classes. I also got in good with the boys down at the station. Donuts. There’s a reason for the cops/donuts cliche. I made it a habit to bring a box whenever I had to go bail somebody out late night, and for that I got run of the firing range and the first phone call when they thought they had a skip cornered.
The rest, as they say, is history. I eventually had enough freelance work to do that I bailed out on my day job, and being a bondsman kept the rent paid.
Not much else to tell, really.”