The word "afterword" has such an air of finality, the cold touch of the afterworld. An attempt to exorcize the novel's daemons, its palimpsests.
Ring the bell. Close the book. Quench the candle.
That's not what this page is about. Maybe "midword" is a better coining. Entr'acte. Right now I'm between publishers. Between agents. Hawking my wares. Portrait of the artist as a huckster. So I'd rather look at it this way:
Ring the bells. Write the books. Light the candles.
Ring the bells
Traditionally an afterword tells you something of how a book came together. Let's start with that. We'll ring the bell of memory. Where did the idea arise to write these books? A gift shop. A card rack. A card showing one of van Gogh's self-portraits. At the time I knew what everybody knows: great painter but crazy as a bedbug. Sliced his own ear off to give to a girl as a love-token. Later killed himself.But a question came to me. Why an ear? If an artist really wanted to prove his love, wouldn't he pluck out his eye to give to his girl?Well, he was bedbug crazy.But what if he wasn't crazy?He sliced his ear off.What if he didn't? What if someone else did it?He killed himself.What if he was murdered?The research began, the questions mounted up, and eventually I had to call in Sherlock Holmes to solve the case. Which led me to turn to the Great Detective any time I had a knotty problem.
Write the books
My new novel is called 6 Characters in Search of a Killer, and you can probably guess from the name that it's not another Sherlock Holmes pastiche. It's a contemporary. a meta-mystery, in the vein of Magpie Murders and The Eighth Detective, although it was inspired by older works: Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, Brautigan's Sombrero Fallout, snd of course Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. Here's a little taste:
I woke up dead. I must have been having an open casket funeral, because I was gazing at a hesitantly arched ceiling that seemed unsure if it wanted to go the full Gothic. I sat up in the coffin and looked around, which gave the lie to my deadness. A dim light filtered through a dinky stained-glass window crawled across what looked to be a small chapel, with a few rows of folding chairs, some mossy-looking carpeting, and a creaky organ tucked away in the corner. There was a large, garish crucifix on the wall behind me, the paint peeling off Jesus’s nose like he had a bad sunburn.I hurt too much to be dead. I would have preferred dead if it were on the menu. Failing that, dead drunk.“It was the most comfy place we could think to put you,” said a woman’s voice in a warm Georgia accent, the kind that makes you think of skeeters hummin’ on the honeysuckle vine. Or is that Kentucky? What do skeeters do in Georgia? Probably bite like mad.
Light the candles
And I am working on at least one more Sherlock story. Since I billed The Strange Case of the Pharaoh's Heart as Holmes's last adventure, I've decided to delve into his first, when he was only eighteen. Holmes makes his London debut--on stage at the Olympic Theatre. And becomes entangled in the coldest case in literary history. No Watson, but he does team up with Victorian actress Marion Terry. And a police inspector named Bucket.
So that's where I am as of this date. Writing, with my literary ghosts peering over my shoulder. Check back here for periodic updates. Excelsior!