Well, it’s a week later than I wanted it to be, but I have now finished the rough (rough!) draft of chapter 2, adding an additional 18k words to the novel so far. Work on Chapter 3 has already started and, again, the goal is to pump it out in a week. It didn’t work out last time, but I am getting in better shape daily for just getting the words out of my head and onto the page.
Thank you to all of you who have been, are, or will be reading this story. It means a lot to me.
Some of you have heard about Sam’s origins from me directly, but many of you have not, so here is a brief backgrounder.
Sam Shovel came into existence during keyboarding (ie typing) class in grade 9. Almost every class we were expected to type without stopping for a period of time. We could bring in text to recopy or we could just make something up – the content didn’t really matter because the point was to be typing.
So, inspired by the Bullet Tracer character in Calvin and Hobbes as well as so much of the hard boiled/film noir detective genre, and playing off of the name of Sam Spade from the Maltese Falcon (a shovel being related to a spade,) I started writing weird little detective short stories with him. He was not, at the time, a serious character in any traditional way. The stories were deliberately mundane and silly, driven by over-dramatics and puns, but sticking to the hard boiled detective conventions – lots of self-aware narration, a sense of grit, larger than life supporting cast, etc.. I had a lot of fun writing Sam.
Over the years I lost the original stories I had written with him, and this still makes me a little sad. I remember them being pretty good! Nonetheless, they were gone and my life took a very different route than grade 9 me could ever have imagined. So, Sam started fading into the back rooms of my awareness over the years, but he was never forgotten. As story ideas inevitably wandered through my brain, Sam was always the first character I turned to, wondering if ti was time to bring him to the foreground of my life again. For years, the answer to that was ‘no.’
But he wasn’t being idle, it turns out. Even if I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to Sam, he was paying attention to me. And in doing so, Sam was slowly and quietly evolving in my unconscious, waiting for his momentous return.
During the turbulent changes that have marked the past 10+ years, Sam has been demanding more and more attention, insisting he has something to say and cases to tackle that are relevant to our times. I was less certain, but he was insistent, so we started talking again.
The news and events of the last decade have challenged our public perception of police and their relationship to communities. I found myself with very mixed feelings about many of the procedural dramas my wife and I enjoy watching. I became more aware of the idyllic and romantic portrayal of police and police departments as essential social heroes. I didn’t like it. But, I was still in love with detective fiction and procedural stories! What to do?
That’s when Sam and I started asking the question: Can you do detective fiction without police? Can it be done without crime? What would that look like?
Some of my favourite detective fiction of the 20th century doesn’t involve cops, or at least doesn’t romanticize them. Travis McGee is a salvage operator living on a houseboat in Florida. Nero Wolf is a New York detective with an open disdain for the skills of the police. Parker, of course, of Donald E. Westlake fame (writing as Richard Stark) is not in any way a good guy. Robert Parker’s Spencer is an ex-cop who operates as much inside the criminal sphere as out. But all of these characters ultimately deal with crimes if not always the police. So, although they all offered me hints and pieces, I still didn’t know how an investigation without a crime would proceed!
Teaching in an inquiry environment (thank you PSII) provided me with the final clue. Everything we do in inquiry teaching and learning is a kind of procedural mystery: there are questions that need detective work to form the answers; things can take wild, unexpected turns; there can be multiple perspectives on the same information; answering the question is always a process.
Sam got very excited, and I couldn’t help but be excited with him. This is it! Sam Shovel, Private Inquirer! Well, maybe not, but the idea was enough. So Sam went from a semi-traditional, hard-boiled detective to an academic drop-out. The world is filled with people who have problems, and they aren’t always criminal but they all need answers.
Pulling his fedora and trench coat out of his bag and putting them back on, Sam declared himself ready to return to the light of day. We got busy planning his new origin and the first of the stories that would allow him to hang his shingle one more. I am now pouring that story out of my head and onto the page as fast as I can, which is still not fast enough for Sam. He is keeping me up nights talking through upcoming scenes, checking on details, prodding me to type for just another ten minutes. He’s really hoping you’ll enjoy his stories.
There is much more to say about Sam, his origins, and his influences, but there is still a lot of book to be written, so that’s enough for now.
Please enjoy this rough draft of the second chapter! As always, comments, questions and observations as welcome and encouraged! And please share with your friends and family!
A final note: I am preparing to leave the Metaverse (Instagram and Facebook) by the new year. All my personal content will be coming down and I will be using it as minimally as possible. I have recently started using Mastadon (@sarge75@mastadon.social) and Bluesky (@sarge75.bsky.social) so there will be a lot of repeated posts as I sort out their workflow. Hello to all my new followers from those sites! Please subscribe for direct notification of updates.
Okay, with a bit of luck, I’ll talk to you all again in a week!
