Hey, sorry to break the rhythm of the narrative here, but this is not chapter two. Before we get to that, I just realized you might want to know a bit about my three books… you know, beyond the fact that they were self-published and generally considered awful by anyone unfortunate enough to read them. I am almost certain you were able to avoid that fate, so I’ll give you the basic gist.

I was first written in 2003, and my creator, an unknown author of no repute – ill or otherwise – wrote three so-called novels about my hardboiled detective adventures. The books were short – thankfully – and they were self-published, never reaching more than a hundred readers or so.

For us characters, being read is the single most important thing. To be ignored by the human public, well, it smarts. Worse still, I was the lead, so I was to blame just as much as my author. I should’ve been a more compelling hero.

Each of my books had some great mystery, usually tied to an artifact of immeasurable value. In the first book, not only did my writer ape The Maltese Falcon, he basically copied the film beat by beat (while exchanging clever character work for supernatural elements). Despite this, I don’t have Spade’s depth, resolve, or charisma. If you will, I’m not richly drawn enough.

As for the actual Sam Spade, he lives over in his world, where he goes about his days sparring with Kasper Gutman and Joel Cairo and the oh-so-alluring Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Occasionally, he leaves to go party with all the other famous characters – none of whom have to worry about being ignored by the human world.

The rest of us, us dramatis personae from books that are never read, movies that are seldom seen, and games that are rarely played – we all look on from the outside. I know I should be grateful that I don’t have a supporting part – they have it harder than us leads. And it is even worse for atmosphere extras – they aren’t even described in person by their authors, but rather populate our worlds to give them a sense of life.

Anyway, my first book was called Richly Drawn and the Silver Phoenix. In it, instead of hunting for a golden falcon of Maltese persuasion, I sought a Silver Phoenix. But this statuette wasn’t just a valuable trinket. It also had a mystical supernatural ability. Upon touching it, the bird icon granted me the ability to see and talk to the dead – something the Silver Phoenix icon would only do for a single person once every one thousand years. How did my author use this plot device? Simple. He had me get in touch with the murder victim. That’s it. One quick conversation, and the dead man told me who did him in. I didn’t get to do any detecting. The whole plot ended anticlimactically. Talk about a lazy ending, never earned, nor foreshadowed in any way.

The second book – by far the best one – was called Richly Drawn and the Curse of the Crimson Cobra. It was yet another tale where I had to hunt down a much coveted, highly valuable idol. In the book, the hunt for the Crimson Cobra took me around the world – to exotic locales such as the city of Tangier and the kingdom of Bhutan, though about half the book took place in the Archeological Museum of Los Angeles. The novel wasn’t nearly as awful as the first and the third book – likely because it was somewhat more original, with only about half of it ripped off from a Humphrey Bogart movie (The Big Sleep, in case you’d like to know). Also, there wasn’t some supernatural thingamabob to hand me the solution to the mystery on a silver platter. On the few occasions I reenact one of my books, this is the one I choose.

The third book, written in 2006, was called Richly Drawn Against the Undead. There were zombies. Lots of them. They moaned “brains.” Clearly, my author wasn’t much for sticking to the mystery genre, and this book was particularly awful, akin to Key Largo meets Night of the Living Dead. In the end, the zombies were explained away as a byproduct of a cursed artifact.

Of course they were.

No. Don’t even think about it. You absolutely do not want to read this book. It’s not even so-bad-it’s-good.

PS I’ll likely do more asides like this, ranting about various things in between chapters.

PSS I know it unlikely that someone out there can hear me, but it can’t hurt to ask. Are you there…?

Next Chapter: Chapter 2