RICHLY DRAWN
Who the heck is Richly Drawn?
Richly Drawn is a gumshoe. He wears a fedora. His has a jutting chin worthy of Dick Tracy. And, he knows he has one of the dumbest names in all of literary creation. Like so many fictional characters, he is unread. The three novels written about him aren’t very good, and neither Richly nor the other characters from his world bother reenacting them. Instead, they go as tourists to the realms of other characters – more famous creations like Sam Spade, or Dracula, or Sherlock Holmes.
These great characters are immortal. With so many readers, they cannot die. It is an absolute rule of the fictional realms.
But when somebody murders both Dorothy Gale and Count Dracula in rapid succession, the rules change. And they aren’t just murdered – they’re erased – the energy from their readers stolen.
No character has ever been deliberately erased before.
Richly is as shocked as any character, but who the hell is he to investigate? It’s not like he came from a good book, unlike geniuses such as Hercule Poirot, Philip Marlowe and Nancy Drew. They are all more skilled than him, with far more readers, and they live in novels that people actually give a damn about.
Trouble is, the murders tie directly to the plot of Richly’s first novel: “The Silver Phoenix.” The killer currently erasing fictional character after fictional character seems to have a connection to the plot of that seldom read book. Also, the treasure from the novel – a silver statue of a phoenix – has vanished.
Richly is thrown out into the deep end. To save others, and to survive, he has to do what no other fictional character has ever done before – he has to solve an actual murder, one not written by an author.
Who the heck is Wolf Kraft?
Hi. That’s me. I wrote “Richly Drawn.” I’m an indie author with a passion for detective stories and genre fiction. I thought it would be a lot of fun to write a gumshoe tale about an unread fictional character who has to solve the very first murder in the realm of stories.
Not that the world of books aren’t already full of murders. If that were the case, the likes of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett wouldn’t have much to write about.
But in “Richly Drawn,” murder means more than just death - it means erasure. What happens when a story is erased, and how does that affect us - reader and character alike? I got the idea for this story while doing research on my documentary “Memories Lost.” The documentary is about films that disappeared, with over half of all films made before 1950 having gone missing. It is just as bad for books, with many classical stories having vanished.
Two of Shakespeare’s plays are lost. Thousands of epic poems from the era of Beowulf are gone. And even several recent books have gone the way of the Dodo, including works from L. Frank Baum, creator of Oz.
My mystery story ties directly into the legacy of lost tales, with the clues given from missing stories – both modern and ancient. To find said clues and stop the killer, Richly will travel to several stories, some well-remembered, and others long since forgotten and shrouded in mystery.
I’ve decided to share six chapters of the novel, so you – the reader – can get a good sense of the book and its style. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, consider ordering a copy and helping me out in the Inkshares mystery competition.
If you’re interested, I’ve published a science fiction novel called “God of Desolation” (currently free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers on Amazon.) You can find a link to that on my website www.wolfkraftwrites.com.
I’m also the creator of History of Horror, a YouTube-series on the history of horror cinema. Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjNg3vF0gDFhh30MqMgOf2w
I hope you enjoy my works, and appreciate you taking the time to read.
Thanks aplenty!
-Wolf Kraft