I have another story in a Raconteur Press anthology, and this one isn’t even flash fiction, it’s a real short story. And completely outside of my comfort zone.
The anthology is called Pinup Noir 3, and the call for stories read:
The final volume in our Pinup Noir series. Everybody loves the femme fatale; the tough-as-nails dame with the smoky voice and the legs that go on forever – almost as much as they love the cynical gumshoe with the strict moral code and the tiniest soft spot in his heart. Hard-boiled detective fiction – America’s gift to literature – was introduced to the world in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, allegedly reached its height in the 1950s; and if you listen to the pundits, died out with the pulp magazines. Hogwash. Hardboiled detective fiction lives on in its offspring: the roman noir, film noir, neo-noir, Mediterranean noir, and last – but certainly not least – cyberpunk.
My story is called ’”Blonde and Blue”, and I researched it by watching a bunch of movies from the 1940s and 1950s: The Big Sleep, Murder My Sweet, The Sweet Smell of Success, and more in that vein. I wanted to do something rather classic, but with a twist, which is that my hard-boiled detective is a Mormon in the Big City. That doesn’t mean he’s innocent or naïve, however.
And that wasn’t the difficult part. The challenge of writing something set in that era is getting the details right. You don’t need a ton of them to set a scene, but so many things have changed in seventy years. Everyone thinks of the advancements in technology, and that is a consideration. After all, telephones are not cell phones, and the way they are used is very different.
But the exchange rate between the present and the past… when describing an era when $40 would get you an apartment in Manhattan, it’s hard to really convey the value of money, and I know I screwed it up some. Because it’s one thing to know that a thousand dollars will let you live for months, and another thing to convey that indirectly. And all while making it relatable to someone who hasn’t watched a bunch of old Bogart movies.
Still, the crew at Raconteur evidently think I did a passable job. I got a nice mention in the introduction, too:
Blonde and Blue is the first story about Hooten’s Mormon detective, who is likely going to have to work a lifetime to get beyond his own personal guilt.
This is my editor’s way of hinting to me that I need to write more stories about this character.
Well, luckily for her, I am doing that right now. It is not any easier this time around, since world building is hard even when you base it on the real world, because the past is still a different country. We think we have all the information we could ever need available through the internet, and that is true to an extent. But convincing the search engines, even with a boost from AI, that you want to know about how people lived in the middle of the last century requires asking the same question several different ways. The plot, even with twists and turns, is a lot easier to imagine than how a day at the races looked from the bettors on the rail to the high rollers in their boxes.
If anyone has a good source, I would be grateful. In the meantime, I’ll keep watching old movies, and maybe pick up some old pulp mysteries. And I’ll keep wrestling this story into shape.