The Subtle Art of Brutality

“We had an understanding and he welched on me.”

“What was the deal?” Howard asks.

“The girl. Let me guess: Denise Carmine?”

“That’s her!” Howard says with a chuckle. “Jeez, Richard, I don’t know how you passed on two—Richard? Richard?”

I hear him shouting my name through the phone. I put my overcoat on, close the office door behind me.

This one I can stop.

His door is solid oak. Stained a deep red, almost brown. The knocker is heavy brass; a ring dangling from the mouth of a lion. Bold. Decisive-looking. I like it. I just might take it with me. Four raps with the lion and I hear his voice on the other side.

“Just a moment. Just a moment, please.”

I keep knocking.

The door opens impatiently.

“Mr. Buckner,” he says, surprised. I step inside without an invitation.

I take the knocker with me when I leave.

Back to TOC

POST SCRIPT

I’ve lived with RDB since early 2006 or so. That’s longer than I’ve lived with my children. Not because I’m a deadbeat dad or anything; my kids are just younger than RDB.

I read a book called Shadows Over Baker Street edited by Michael Reaves and John Pelan that was a short story collection about what would happen if Sherlock Holmes entered the world of H.P. Lovecraft. Sounded intriguing. I was sold on the concept of Holmes’s superior logic versus the nightmare insanity of Lovecraft’s domain. It was worth the cover price.

A little while later I read Kiss Me, Judas by Will Christopher Baer. All I could think about was the narrative voice. One of the few times in my life since Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (yeah, I’m one of those guys) where I just gripped a book as hard as I could and knew I needed to write like this. I loved the voice. Loved it. Needed to be like it.

So my plan was to use that voice (at the time I had no concept of noir or hardboiled as terms) and write a story about some gritty, brass-knuckles PI who was thrust into a nightmare world where his police logic didn’t help. Hardboiled detective versus pure evil.

My wife Donna helped me name the man Richard Dean Buckner. We were sitting in a California Pizza Kitchen and mulled it over dinner. My dad told me all about .44 Magnums and how cops worked. I mixed my home town of Kansas City, Missouri, and the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay area for Saint Ansgar.

And then I pitted RDB versus a resurrected demon-thing that was trying to make Earth its new hell.

No one touched it.

No one.

I don’t even think I got the courtesy of a form rejection. I think I just got tossed, un-opened, into the slush pile. Deflated, deterred, upset, I cried into my pillow for weeks. I probably cut myself too. Sure, the book was full of plot holes and inconsistent logic (where were you then, Chuck? Benoit?), but it had a freakin’ .44 Magnum shooting a monster! Rejection to a story so great was tantamount to absolute bullshit from the universe itself.

So I wrote another book about other people doing other things. And then another book, about more people doing other things.

But I never forgot about that dude. The only guy I knew that was badass enough to get swallowed by a hulking, tumorous demon just so he could get close enough to her beating heart to stuff it with dynamite.

And one day, I figured RDB might do better in the real world, so I started writing about that. I wound up writing this book. This was 2009.

Beat to a Pulp published the first chapter of this book as a stand-alone story and I am eternally grateful. I used the pen name Derek Kelly for reasons I can’t really remember now. BTAP editor and founder David Cranmer did for me what no one else had done: given me the deep-seeded satisfaction of making RDB relevant to the crime world. That was such a blast to my waning dream of being published that I kept up the fight. It was rejuvenating. BTAP was nothing to mess with, and if they liked RDB, others might as well.

I did a couple of RDB short stories and was honored by having them published at Crime Factory issue #7 again under the name Derek Kelly and Shotgun Honey under my own name. He’s appeared in Crime Factory #12 and Two Bullets Change Everything, a split I did with Chris Rhatigan and put out through All Due Respect Books.

So, thanks to God.

Thanks to my wife Donna, who, since I first asked her out on a date back in 1995 until right now, has been the sun around which my universe revolves. She has given me the greatest gifts I could ever receive in the form of our little babies and without her, I would be absolutely nothing.