One More For The Road

As is increasingly becoming the norm (this is a good thing), I’ve finished the work to get book 5, The Fist Inside the Glove, of the Monk Buttman Mystery series, out to my adoring public. This means editing for serious things like plot continuity, character dialog tags, and all those possessives that go unnoticed till it’s too late; cover design; PDF mistakes, which happen, and the general wonderment that, wow, this is going to happen. It’s a lot of work, and mostly on me as I’m not a big named author…at least not yet.

The writing, the creating of another chapter in a longer story (the Buttman books are sequential, carrying on in time) is the most fun. Initially, a theme comes to mind, in the case of The Fist Inside the Glove, it’s the power that comes with money, and the belief that having wealth confers a greater say in how the world ought to operate. Mostly, it buys influence. So what happens to someone like Monk, who goes from having a little money to more than he’ll ever need? When a little known book, The Court Jester, comes into his possession, he considers it a joke, the stuff of rich whiners unhappy with their minions. But when the people he knows and respects have grave concerns over the book, he begins to wonder.

There’s also an unpopular president, and a congress and government that is considered incompetent and indifferent to the desires of the people. Sound familiar? Something needs to change, and maybe the answer is in this small book Monk thinks is a grift. Throw in his wife, Agnes’ family feud, his own family dramas, and the weight of being suddenly important, adds to the fun.

If you think that possibly getting killed in the process is fun.

In tone, I wanted the story to be a little lighter, despite the subject matter. And as I’m a fan of the greats in the genre of private and amateur detectives, I thought it would be interesting to give the story more of a Nick and Nora vibe from Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man. Across the books, Monk and Agnes have developed a certain repartee between them, and I wanted to expand on that. The dreary, but very necessary, tasks of editing are in some ways mitigated when you like what you’ve written, and if you’re going to do the editing (which is often advised against, but pricey when sent out) it’s best if you’re not thoroughly sick of what you’ve written.

And I like what I’ve written.

Meanwhile, I’m working on book 6, titled, The Object of Our Desire. Have to keep the content flowing through the pipeline.

The Fist Inside the Glove, will be released on December 8th. It can be pre-ordered here, and here.

©2022 David William Pearce