Today's The Write Stuff with... feature In the Beginning comes from author Lev D. Lewis talking about the inspiration behind and creation of his debut novel Jellyfish.
“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.” (Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, Ch. 34)
After spending the summer dwelling on this fact, Frank appeared more or less complete: a down-at-heel private investigator working on the mean streets of London who had gone to a comprehensive school (a school where in real life my sister had gone to) half-a-mile away from where Chandler attended his public school.
Frank finds his own life bleak and boring but, aware of the Chandler connection, has developed a Marlowe fantasy to overcome the dullness.
I gave my nose another wipe and rang the doorbell, still wondering: goon or dame? That was the fantasy, the thought that behind the next door may lurk a goon with a gun or a dame with legs. It brought a frisson of sun-baked Californian menace to the wearying trudge down streets as cold and grey and wet as a drowned man’s shadow, between doors that only opened, if they opened at all, on the desperate and despairing . . . No wonder my nose is always running. If I had had anywhere to go, I’d have run too.
When, in the course of a routine job, Frank stumbles across a murdered student in an alley, he is forced to turn his fantasy into action armed with nothing but native guile and intuition.
And the Investigator’s Fallacy: the belief that my native guile and intuition counted.
