Not for Nothing: the Dirt

I wrote Not for Nothing right on the heels of a second read of Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress. And that read was because the movie showed up on some ninety-nine cent shelf, to remind me, to impress me, to lure me. And I’ve been telling anybody who asked that that was probably right around 2006 — I was pretty sure Not for Nothing was the last novel I wrote before Flushboy, in 2007. Just looked at the timestamps on the old files, though, and: And that’s kind of forever ago. Specifically, going by that date, it’s right about here, when I was carrying Spillane around in my pocket all the time: And, when I wrote it, I was pretty sure I was the first to pull off this second-person PI shuffle. But ‘first’ only matters if you say it out loud, right? Robert Coover beat me to the punch with his Noir in 2010, which broke my heart in all the usual ways. But, really, of course there’d been second-person PI stuff before that, in the choose-your-own-adventures mines. So we both got beat, I figure (but I got beat a lot worse). As for why Coover did it, I can’t say. As for why I did it, I half-suspect I cribbed the trick from those occasional drops into the rhetorical second-person you get in the old stuff, the Spillane and Marlowe and Chandler; when those narrators want to get really gritty but are trying to hide it so as to be not quite so abrasive, they can  . . . → → →