Liner Notes For The Rumour Of The Illustrious Client
The title of the story is a reference to a Sherlock Holmes story; a late one but a memorable one. That story revolves around a womanising rogue and the Illustrious Client takes an interest as it seems he intends to marry a respectable woman whose family are highly-placed. I’d originally intended a few parallels to Doyle’s work, but as it turned out that didn’t work with the other elements.
For a start by bringing the Illustrious Clients closer to the action there’s the possibility that someone reading the story might imagine that it is referring to some real, and really illustrious people. Nothing could be further from the truth! This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to real persons or events is purely coincidental.
Anyway with that out of the way, here we are again with the lowest form of investigator; the tabloid gossip columnist. Tim Harris here was behind the b-plot (possibly the a-plot) of The Report On The Haunting Of Bingley Manor. So if you felt as though you didn’t get enough closure of that one, here you go!
(Why did I stop where I did in Bingley Manor? Two reasons, one good, one bad. The good one is that I was trying to have some classical unities, of place, time, characters and also style. Namely I wanted to follow Larry Kowalski on an afternoon on set. To go further I would need to either leave him to follow Lacey, or awkwardly have him hang around while she gets on with the investigation, which would need to be even more awkwardly accelerated or have a time skip, both of which would mess up the structure. The bad reason is that I’d already written almost 6,000 words and had come to a fairly good stopping place, I wanted to get on with the hen night story (which as it turned out was very hard as lockdown had stated in the meantime)).
Talking of the hen night story, that’s when I decided that Lacey Lee was working in 2019 throughout these stories. Before that the idea was that they happened in real time, so the first one took place in January 2020. This was a problem for any that took place after March when COVID-19 would have been a main character.
Moving it back of course enabled me to make some allusions to the Illustrious Clients, who, I re-iterate, are fictional characters and not based on real people. Still, some very co-incidental parallels emerged while I was writing this if you think about it.
I wouldn’t recommend using this story as a basis for real surveillance or counter-surveillance methods, but I did my best. It’s hard to follow someone who thinks they’re being followed and is willing to do something about it. It’s easy if they don’t know or care. Larry isn’t exactly wrong in his efforts to learn more about detective work so he can act as a detective, but authenticity is over-rated. If it looks good on screen/on paper that’s the most important thing. I’m not writing how to guides or a story that claims to be true-to-life here. It’s pulp detective adventures, and if you’re entertained by it then as far as I’m concerned I’ve done my job.
I won’t complain if you’ve learned something too.
Comments