the beginnings of a bad noir story
Muhahahaha!!!! I'm dabbling once again in the realms of writing. I should stick to poetry, which I'm good at, instead of fiction, which I'm not. Either way here's something I played with for a little while this afternoon. It's the beginnings of what seems to be the usual hardboiled detective schtick (intentionally so, and intentionally cliche, but I want to go somewhere different with it.)
In short, the cheese is deliberate.
I'd like to turn it into a short story twisting the usual by making the detective the criminal, starting by murdering his wife, then disposing of the body in an interesting way, and going from there. Here's what little I've got down. There's no paragraph indents on here, so I changed it to spaces instead.
Heat
In the engine of a car, horsepower drops about 1 percent for every ten-degree increase of the air coming into the intake. Bob Wiley felt like he was about 10 horsepower down just sitting in his office.
It was a grungy little dump, neat, clean, but with a certain feeling of grime, of being second rate that even the best cleaning wouldn’t get out. It was soaked into the walls, like the smell of spilled gin on the rug, or garlic in his mother’s kitchen.
At least he had a view. Being stuck on the top floor of a four-story office building with no working elevator will do that though. Best damned scenery in this whole part of town, which in this case meant a few blocks of rundown warehouses, and the river off to the east.
Today though the windows were fogged up by the humidity, and by the tiny difference in the inside and outside air. A few of the blinds had been broken out by the cat his secretary had got in better days. The cat was gone, and so was the secretary. Shame really, sometimes he missed the cat.
The a/c acted a lot like his ex; it was there alright, but never worked itself too hard. It kicked in just enough to knock the electric bill through the roof and keep you from going outside into the air and the light, where you might be ten degrees warmer, but it was at least thirty degrees saner. The landlord promised he’d send someone up to look at again beginning of next week. Yeah, sure, just like the last three times.
Sweat ran down his back to the place where his gray shirt stuck to his skin, and sweat left quickly fading handprints on the glass top of the desk as he leaned forward to open the latest past-due notices, when all of a sudden, she walked in. Oh shit.
Bob and his ex-wife were a study in contrasts. Like Abbot and Costello, like Jeckyll and Hyde, that bad. He was thirty-eight, five-nine, strong, but a little on the heavy side. If you saw him on the street and didn’t meet his eyes, yours would slide right past him, which suited him fine. Brown hair, not ugly, not pretty, more or less Irish features nothing particular that stood out about him except for the blue of his eyes. If anything described him it was ex. Ex-army, ex-cop, ex-husband, ex-baptist, expert in all the ways your life can go wrong when you try to set up a business on your own.
She on the other hand. She. She. She. Everyone noticed her. How could they not? Tall, taller than he was, she had a figure like a model. Blond hair straight out of the bottle, blue eyes, and the best body money could buy. Conversations faltered when she glided into a room. And she always glided. She had a flare for dramatics that had made the last four years of their marriage hell. And this time wasn’t going to be any different.
There ya go, maybe a page, and no action or dialogue yet. Hope you're drinking wine, 'cause that was cheesetastic. Raymond Chandler eat your heart out.