Peter Robinson: The Price of Love and Other Stories

I had to travel quite a long way to teach, and on one of those bus journeys I remembered passing every day a small private investigation office above a strip mall. I could see a few dusty cabinets and stacked files through the window as the bus passed by, but I never saw who worked there. That made very fertile ground for the imagination, and so “Jones Investigations” was born, Old Jones being the grizzled old founder who was usually too drunk to investigate but passed on all he knew to his young protégé Colin Lang, an English student with a PhD who couldn’t get a teaching job and didn’t want to drive a taxi.

Around the time I finished the novel, called Beginner’s Luck, I heard that the Inspector Banks series — at least the first two — had been accepted for publication. After that, it seemed, nobody was interested in a private eye novel written by me and set in Toronto, so Beginner’s Luck languished in the bottom drawer of my desk. I occasionally dusted it off, and even had vague ideas for a sequel, but Banks occupied all my time, so nothing ever became of them.

When the Toronto Star asked for a story they could serialize over a week, I thought again of Beginner’s Luck. While writers might dream of turning a short story into a novel, here I was turning a novel into a short story. In the end, it was easier simply to retain the key plot elements and main characters and dump everything else — subplots, minor characters, a lot of background and exposition. I don’t think I even mention the detective’s name in the short story! It was published in seven installments, each one with at least a minor cliff-hanger to heighten anticipation for the next. In a small way, I got to feel a bit like Charles Dickens must have felt writing his works for serialization, though I already knew how my story was going to end. I have inserted an eighth part for this edition, a scene I particularly liked in the novel but wasn’t previously able to use because of length restrictions.

“The Price of Love.”Written for a Mystery Writers of America anthology called The Blue Religion, edited by Michael Connelly, this story was another big challenge for me to do something different. The anthology was meant to deal with the “burden of the badge” that is a policeman’s lot, and as most of the contributors were American crime writers, I expected a high-testosterone mix of tough guys and action. As it turned out, that isn’t the case, and the anthology is full of variety in everything except its quality. Not a bad one in the bunch. Anyway, I still wanted to shy away even from Banks and his feelings about being a cop, so I decided to use a different kind of hero and a different kind of badge.

“Birthday Dance.”Some of the subjects for these themed crime anthologies can be most challenging, and I have been involved in a number of such projects, including poker, American football, Shakespeare and, in this one, the Bible, for Anne Perry’s Thou Shalt Not Kill. Well, the Bible is certainly full of murder and mayhem, but again it was a matter of avoiding the obvious, or putting an unusual twist on something. I had recently seen Strauss’s opera Salome, so that story was fresh in mind, and when I started to research its origins I found more doubt and obscurity than I did certainty, which suited me just fine. Writers thrive much better on doubt and uncertainty than on facts and self-evident truths. Nobody was even sure how old Salome was, or whether she was old enough to perform the dance of the seven veils for which she is so infamous! The idea of a sort of innocent Salome appealed, and in the end the story turned out as a sort of cross between a Bible story and an episode of The Sopranos.

“Like a Virgin.”My publishers asked me for a new Banks story for the collection, and I wrote a novella. This is it.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

“Going Back” was first published in Not Safe After Dark and Other Stories, Macmillan and McClelland & Stewart, © 2004 by Peter Robinson. “Cornelius Jubb” first appeared in Like a Charm, ed. Karin Slaughter, William Morrow, 2004. “The Magic of Your Touch” first appeared in Murder and All That Jazz, ed. Robert J. Randisi, Signet, 2004. “The Eastvale Ladies’ Poker Circle” first appeared in Dead Man’s Hand, ed. Otto Penzler, Harcourt, 2007. “The Ferryman’s Beautiful Daughter” first appeared in A Merry Band of Murderers, ed. Claudia Bishop and Don Bruns, Poisoned Pen Press, 2006. “Walking the Dog” first appeared in Toronto Noir, ed. Janine Armin and Nathaniel G. Moore, Akashic Books, 2008. “Blue Christmas” was first published by Crippen & Landru in an edition of 353 copies for friends of the publishers, Christmas, 2005. “Shadows on the Water” first appeared in Men from Boys, ed. John Harvey, William Heinemann, 2003. “The Cherub Affair” first appeared in the Toronto Star, 2003. “The Price of Love” first appeared in The Blue Religion, ed. Michael Connelly, Little, Brown, 2008. “Birthday Dance” first appeared in Thou Shalt Not Kill, ed. Anne Perry, Carroll & Graf, 2005. “Like a Virgin,” © 2009 by Eastvale Enterprises Inc.