Guest Post: The Code

By Jim Winter

Most PI characters have a code, whether it’s stated outright or implied by the character’s actions.

There are lines Spenser would never cross. Marlowe gets damned preachy about it. Hammer’s even more physical, using his fists to emphasize his point. The PI story is often about what the protagonist believes.

Bad Religion is more about the protag questioning what he believes. For starters, if you read Second Hand Goods (and if you haven’t, it’s $2.99 on most ereaders. Go. Now. I’ll wait.), you know that Nick and his married secretary Elaine had a fear-driven one-night stand. As Bad Religion begins, Nick is already pondering if that was the mistake they told each other it was or something more. What prompts Elaine to start dangling the forbidden fruit once more, aside from her crumbling marriage, is an opportunity for them to leave their patrons at TTG Insurance for an office of their own.

Nick says no when he realizes a Russian mobster with delusions of legitimacy is the money man behind the potential new client. Nick refuses to “sell his soul to the devil,” only to learn that a criminal with his own set of rules is not the worst person to do business with.

And then there’s the case itself, an associate pastor of a popular suburban church accused of skimming the collection plate. As Nick and Elaine dig into church politics and shady real estate deal, Nick is forced to face that pesky God issue he’s ignored since he was a teenager. Nick was never the most devout Catholic and never embraced atheism, but he is forced to define himself as he watches two reverends – one genuine and humble, the other a preening huckster – struggle with their own beliefs. True to his ambiguous nature, Nick doesn’t really resolve the issue.

In the end, Nick is left wondering what the hell happened. He knows even less about what he believes and has crossed lines he would never have dreamed of even days before the story begins.

About the only thing he believes in at the end is guilt.

He doesn’t need God for that. He’s racked up enough of it on his own.

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Character Evolution

Guest Post from Jim Winter

I am a middle-aged college student. That probably means nothing to you unless you read my blog and listen to me bitch about the profs sucking up all my primo writing time. But one of the classes I’m taking this semester is physical anthropology, which is the study of evolution. And it’s of evolution I wish to speak today.

Yeah, that was a long-winded way to get to character evolution, but here we are. Specifically, how do series characters evolve before we ever see them in their debut books. For Nick Kepler, it was a long, drawn-out process. The first anyone saw of him was in the original Plots WithGuns where he’s doing a sort of back-and-forth describing why he’s walking along a deserted stretch of highway at 3 AM in a light rain and how he got there. 

That character looks nothing like the one in the outline to Northcoast Shakedown ($2.99 on Amazon, Nook, and Smashwords, not to mention a whole bunch o’ other readers.)  But then he looks nothing like the poor schmuck who is stalked by his client in “Valentine’s Day,” and definitely not the guy who, in a moment of fear, starts boffing his married secretary in Second Hand Goods.

How much of this is the character? And how much is the writer? I’d have to say it’s about 50/50. In the beginning, I had no clue who this guy was. By the time I finished “A Walk in the Rain,” I knew Nick Kepler was, in 2001, 33, played in a bar band that did classic rock covers, and had a friend named Lenny who stole cars for a living. By the end of Second Hand Goods, his life is a lot more complicated.

But I’ve seen this sort of thing before. When Stephen King wrote the first story about Salem’s Lot, there was nothing about the Marsten House or any clue that there was anything more special about the place except for a bizarre spot in the woods where some evil stuff took place around the time Nathaniel Greene was cracking British skulls in that part of New England. One novel and a bad miniseries later, we get a vampire novel that has as much in common with Twilight as the Rolling Stones have in common with the Spice Girls.

A lot of times, the short stories authors create are little more than rough drafts of a character they opted to share with the public. Sometimes the author gets lucky, as I have, and can keep the storyline consistent. Other times, you have to accept the fact that the author had no clue what he or she was doing.

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Jim Winter programs web sites by day, attends college and writes nasty tales by night. Born in Cleveland, he lives in Cincinnati with his wife Nita and stepson AJ.  Find out what he is up to at http://www.jamesrwinter.net