Detective Novel
The story of this book and a look at the final cover
This book shouldn't exist. It was a half finished story once. It was a stack of pages sitting piled among various pieces of unfinished work in the middle of a room the night my house burned down.
That phrasing sounds dramatic. The structure didn't fall in on itself. There were still beams in place after. Walls. But it was done, a ruin. Gas leak did it. Two rooms were obliterated, everything in them torched or melted or just gone. Other rooms contained bizarre artifacts spared among the leavings of a havoc that came and went.
The living room was farthest from the event. Anything along the walls was in the path. The winds follow the walls. Those got it first. Pictures, artwork, the intimate tidbits of personality that make a place feel like home. Shelves of books stained a uniform black all. A computer warped into slag where it sat.
At the room's center sat a couch. Putting a couch in the middle of a room is tacky, but this isn't why we're here. On a trunk in front of that couch I had left sitting all this unfinished writing. I never work on just one thing, I'm a little all over the place. I keep whole notebooks of notes. All of it was sitting out, stacked or piled in the middle of this swirl of smoke and heat. But because it was in the room's middle, because it was as far from the worst of the carnage in the room farthest from the blast, or maybe just because sometimes the universe offers up a little bit of a break, the writing made it. It was a soot blacked mess, it stunk to high heaven, but it was still there.
I'll wrap this up, it's too long already. That was a tumultuous time. Before and after. There was a complicated, awful breakup, a few months prior a friend had passed away, I was helping a relative with health issues that went on and on. A lot all over. It was not a time for writing. After the fire I stuck those notebooks in a box and left them in storage. I left everything that might be salvageable in storage. Some of it in time it turned out very much was not salvageable. But those pages were. This book was.
It all seems like a very long time ago now, but also it doesn't at all. It was a long time ago, but also it wasn't. At all. Time's funny like that. This book was written across a lot of it. Time. This is a book that shouldn't exist. But now it does.
—Craig
Here is the final cover, designed by Tex Gresham, for Detective Novel, publishing July 8 through Death of Print/Malarkey.
Preorder now to reserve a signed copy.
