Sometimes writing a story is like walking in a dark room blindfolded. You bump into walls a lot until you find the door.
That’s what I was doing with the sixth Frank Nagler Mystery, “NAGLER’S SECRET.”
I was writing fun scenes with Nagler chasing people around Ironton, N.J. and people chasing Nagler, especially a red head, who sometimes was not a red head, but who seemed to know a lot about our cop hero.
It was fun, and beginning to make sense.
Then I wrote this sentence — “Every story has a hole at the bottom, something that doesn’t fit, doesn’t make sense, but you write it anyway because that’s what plays out.” – and I found the door.
So, the question is: Can I write a mystery about that premise, which is not just about the characters’ search for knowledge, but about the writer’s process in a story that survives on two levels?
We’ll see what plays out.
The award winning Frank Nagler Mysteries, published by Imzadi Publishing, are available in ebook, paperback and audio book on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and in paperback at Book & Puppet in downtown Easton, Pa.
Kirkus Reviews called Nagler, “One of modern fiction expertly drawn detectives.”
The scene:
“Every story has a hole at the bottom, something that doesn’t fit, doesn’t make sense, but you write it anyway because that’s what plays out. Sometimes what’s missing is bigger than the whole story.”
Jimmy Dawson offered a wheezing chuckle that ripped into a deep cough. The kid journalist opposite him in the bar booth with a spiderweb of cracked green vinyl stared uncomfortably as the old reporter with eyes closed hacked a cough into a handkerchief. It wasn’t the first time.
Dawson leaned back in the booth to calm himself with a few deep breaths. The meds weren’t working. Something by Tom Petty rattled out of hidden speakers, swirled around a patron or two mouthing the words and settled into the aimless density of a dead-end bar, a place so old you could never scrape from the walls the voices, the faces, the pieces of a thousand lives because you wouldn’t know what to do with them if you did.
A place Dawson chose to tell the one story that had crawled up and down his back for decades, a story that never shook out of his notebooks. A story so filled with misdirection that after you followed the turns, cut away the weeds of lies and smirking self-satisfaction, you found yourself where you started because it was filled with everything that needed to be told, and nothing that made sense.
“Nothin’ squared, kid,” Dawson said, his voice like cracked concrete rolling in a drum. “Everything was round pegs and square holes, ephemera. Sometimes on a story if you dig deep enough the lies that you were told on Monday cleared by Sunday because someone else told the same lie with a little less shade. But not on this one.” Dawson squinted into the bar’s darkness, uncertain why the place seems so dark, uncertain if it was his eyes or the weight of everything he knew pressing down.
I want to feel light, Dawson thought. But if I dump it on this kid, it’s gonna sink him.
“You okay, Mr. Dawson?” the kid asked.
“It’s Jimmy. No one calls me Mr. Dawson.”
Dawson stopped because he couldn’t recall the kid’s name because maybe he wasn’t paying attention. Where did he come from? Right, an intern from Ironton State’s media program.
“You really want to know this, kid?” Such a young pasty face.
“Yeah.” He pinned his eyes to the table. “I heard stuff.”
“Not pretty.”
“Not sure it’s supposed to be.”
Dawson rubbed his face and sucked a breath through the moss of his damaged lungs.
“We weren’t sure he’d ever survive it, and all this time later, I can’t say that he did.”
“That’s Detective Frank Nagler, right? So, what’s the secret?”
“Ain’t that easy.” Dawson liked the kid’s spunk. “You’ll have to figure it out yourself. Maybe you will.”
The kid grinned, confident as a rope walker with no wind or net, knowing that if he fell, none of that mattered.
“Where do I start?”
Dawson passed his secret, one he had kept for years. He sat straight, lighter.
“Bastion Street, September 1994.”
