Dead Schmed

The reek hung in the air for days afterward. Had it not been for its persistence—and the cigar butt—I might have thought Smed’s visit was a dream, or a psychotic episode.

I had a few bad days after that. Work on Brooked for Murder came to an utter and complete halt. I could no longer support the concept of a fly-fishing detective. Gloom settled upon me like the great fuzzy cold choking antimatter quilt of death. See what I mean? There should be a law against people like me; instead they prescribe Prozac and martinis.

I decided that the time had come to reassess my literary career, a process that began with a careful and critical re-reading of my oeuvre—all twenty-seven novels. I read the eight Oliver Gant spy novels I had written back in the late seventies and early eighties. I read the entire Hector Pringle detective series. I forced myself through the Fieldstone Chronicles, a bucolic family saga set in 1930s. I read the first three books in my fly-fishing-detective series, and I even re-read In the Failing Light of Northern Days, a literary novel that consumed much of the late 1980s and was published to no acclaim whatsoever by Grayweed Press.

None of this lifted my spirits, not even a micron.

Not that the novels were awful, but they seemed sort of light. Except for my “literary” effort. That was simply bad. Light novels do not age well, unless you are P.G. Wodehouse. Bad novels do not age at all.

After a week or so of gloom and doom, I started to fight back. Does being deceased automatically give Smed a window into the future? No, it does not, I reasoned. Nor does discorporeality imply honesty, goodness, or helpfulness. The ghost could be playing games with my head for its own amusement. Probably laying bets with his dead friends on how I would react to his visit.

I called Roberto, my editor, a dozen times that week. After several rambling, whining, apparently purposeless conversations, he got a little
impatient. The last thing I remember him saying was, “I need that trout book on my desk by the end of the month, Pete.”

“I’m working on something else,” I said. He hung up on me.

The next few times I called, his assistant told me he was in a meeting.

When your editor won’t take your calls, that’s the beginning of the end. They’ll stop publishing your books, your existing titles will be remaindered, royalty checks will cease to arrive, and the next thing you know you’re dead, your books piled high in a bin with the work of other forgotten hacks in a few used bookstores where they are priced by the pound.

I kept the butt end of Smed’s cigar in an ashtray on my desk. Every so often I would catch a whiff of tobacco. I’d spin around, trying to catch him. At most, I’d see a wisp of smoke.

I wasn’t getting any writing done. I couldn’t bear to so much as look at the “trout book,” and nothing else was working for me. I couldn’t even write a short story. I could compose words and sentences, sure. I could write long descriptions of the fuzzy cold choking antimatter quilt of death. I could write grocery lists, obscene limericks, checks, and letters to the editor. I could even write plot outlines, synopses, and character sketches. What I couldn’t do was to like any of my ideas enough to build a story around them. Everything I came up with felt like it would all too quickly go out of print.

I blamed it all on Smed.

“Hey,” I said to the empty room. “Show yourself, ghost. I got a bone to pick with you.”

Maybe, being dead, he was offended by the bone-picking reference. He didn’t show.

***


Posted

in

,

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.