A Moment of Doubt by Jim Nisbet

wait a minute. We have the conventions, the mutual agreement between the author and the reader on certain matters of style, as laid out in the (unwritten) (hexadecimal) Hardboiled Bylaws. These, and the matter of big words. The detective does not have processed hair, o.k.? Get it straight. And never, ever, send your reader to the dictionary. He won’t go. Not only that, he’ll get pissed offat you because of his lack of knowledge. Moreover, the thought will absolutely not occur to him that it’s his knowledge that’s wanting, rather than your facility with the language. Surely, he will say, you uppity scrivener, there’s a word containing fewer letters and syllables, approximately equivalent to ‘interstices’? How does one pronounce that, anyway? It sounds like a brand of seat-belt for a race of spiders . . . .
    I’ve tripped the Fag Flag in the Hard Boiled Bylaws. I forgot about it, or went too far, or no longer care . . . . Something . . . . At any rate, BOOK.SUB knows. When I return to my room the floor will be two feet thick in tractor-feed paper, covered with excoriations written at my own keyboard a scant two years ago . . . . BOOK.SUB will have rejected Squeam with a Skew in its entirety. That might have been o.k., but in dumping the book to disk on my computer the printer will fire up and list everything, the manuscript itself, the legal justifications, ticking off the appropriate Hardboiled Bylaws . . . . It’ll all be there, waiting for Marlene’s fireplace, and, later, the Rewrite and, ultimate bummer, Diminished Returns.
    This particular Bylaw is real simple. It says, Tough guys don’t get sodomized . That’s it. And, in extremis : Yea, even may they Pitch, verily they do not Catch . Now, I wield enough economic power to get around some things. After all, I’m a member of the Mystery Writers of America, who subscribe to these unwritten laws. And, bottom line, I’ve made some money. But here I’ve gone a step too far. There’s a corollary to the Sodomy Clause, and it’s real simple, too. It says: And if they do [get sodomized], they don’t like it. No way. Ever.
    There are notable exceptions. Cain’s Serenade , for example—although, look out, for here looms large ye Moral Imperative. A contemporary series, for another example, stars a gay detective, although, in fact, so far as I know, he cleaves, ahem, hard by the extremis corollary.
    But the point is, even though festooned with all these conventions, these unshaven detectives got to look clean, morally, that is: they can be hygienically reprehensible (it’s preferable), but their foe has to be morally inferior to them. They’re carrying around more eponymous gear than a soldier of fortune . . . .
    There he goes again. “Eponymous.” Sounds like a phone booth on a planet of spiders . . . Greek spiders . . . .
    So along with that, certain characters got to have ruined throats and cancer in their lives, to lend a certain amount of grit to this hallucination folks like to snuggle into and get thrilled by, while flying coast to coast or waiting on Death Row, like having a certain amount of sand in your salad means it’s organic lettuce, or something . . . .
    I mean, you’ve never even questioned Marlene’s existence have you? In fact, aren’t you just coasting along in here, waiting for me to get back to the house and be raped by Marlene? Or Tiny? Now there’s a real guy . . . . That immense cock of his looks like the bowsprit of the Flying Dutchman , heaving out of the gloom of the seedy Tenderloin hotel room . . . . You can hear the squish as he strokes the fantastic length and thickness of the far end of his viscera . . . .
    Viscera. That’s eyewash on the planet of spiders, just hold it up to your face with your pedipalps . . . . Well don’t forget the octoculars , too, godammit. You know, binoculars for spiders? Eight eyepieces, eight lens