Robert Rankin - Waiting for Godalming

“Oh yeah. Right.” A laugh came from the tortured soul. “The flowers. I got very angry over the flowers. Because of what they’d done to me. Because they’d given me the power to see something so awful that it would ultimately lead to my own destruction. As it has. So I went back there, to punish the flowers. To stamp them to oblivion. But then I thought no, it wasn’t their fault. They were quite mad, you see, the flowers. That’s what happens when you’re deprived of sleep. When you cannot dream. You go mad. The flowers couldn’t dream and so the flowers went mad.

“But I did go back. I made a kind of pilgrimage. I wanted to see whether the floodlights had been repaired. And if they had, then I would break them again. So I returned to the Memorial Park, and do you know what I found when I got there?”

“What?”

“Nothing,” said the tortured soul. “Nothing whatsoever. You see, there was no floral clock in that park. There never had been.”

“What are you saying? Speak to me.”

Another silent moment, then another voice spoke.

“Save your breath on him,” it said. “He’s dead.”

Now this is where I came into this tale, so listen up people and listen up good.

With me you get what you pay for, when you pay for the best private eye in the business. I don’t come cheap, but I’m thorough and I get the job done. I know my genre and I stick to it. When I’m on the case, you can expect a lot of gratuitous sex and violence, a corpse-strewn alley and a final rooftop showdown.

And along the way you’ll get all the stuff that you get when you pay for the best. You’ll get a generous helping of trenchcoat humour, a lot of old toot being talked in a bar, running gags about the mispronunciation of my name and my trusty Smith and Wesson, a dame that does me wrong and a deep dark whirling pit of oblivion that I tumble down into, when she bops me on the head at the very beginning of every new case.

That’s the way that I do business, always has been, always will be. Because, like I say, I stick to my genre. And because, like I say, I’m the best.

If you’re looking to get all fancy and post-modern, then don’t come a-knocking at my partition door. Because if what you want is a lot of psychological fol-de-rol and a tormented detective with a drink problem and a broken marriage, who’s coming to terms with a tragedy that happened in his youth and is reaching out to his feminine side, then buddy you’ve come to the wrong address.

But if your taste is for a hard-nosed, lantern-jawed, snap-brimmed-fedora’d, belt-knotted-trenchcoated, bourbon-swigging, Camel-smoking, lone-walking, smart-talking, pistol-packing, broad-smacking, mean-fighting, hot-pastrami-biting, tricky-case-solving son-of-a-goddamn-prince-among-men, then knock at the door and walk right in and ask for me by name.

And the name to ask for is Woodbine. As if you hadn’t guessed.

Lazlo Woodbine, Private Eye.

Some call me Laz.

You see me, I keep it classic and I keep it simple.

I work just the four locations. An office where my clients come. A bar where I talk a load of old toot and where the dame that does me wrong bops me on the head at the beginning of the case. An alleyway, where I get into tricky situations, and a rooftop where I have my final confrontation with the villain.

No spin-offs, no loose ends and all strictly in the first person. No great genre detective ever needed more than that and no detective ever came greater than me.

So, with that said, and pretty goddamn well said too, let’s get us down to the business in hand and begin it the way that it always begins.

And it always begins like this.

It was another long hot Manhattan night and I was sitting in Fangio’s, chewing the fat with the fat boy. The fat boy’s name was Fangio, but the fat we chewed went nameless.

It had been a real lean year for me and I hadn’t had a case to solve with style since the big one of ’98. Times were getting tough.

It’s all well and good being hailed as “the detective’s detective”, and having your craggy silhouette on the cover of Newsweek magazine and your office featured in Hello! , but fame won’t buy you a ticket to ride if you don’t have the fare for the ferryman.

At the present, I was down.

My bank account was redder than a masochist’s butt and the trench had washed out of my trenchcoat. The trusty Smith and Wesney Snipes was gathering rust in Papa Legba’s pawnshop and my now legendary snap-brim seemed to suit my landlord who had taken it in lieu of last month’s rent.

I was down.

Down. Down.

Deeper and down.

I was deeper and down than a pit lad’s purse in a pocket of Pleistocene pumice. More at sea than a Lascar’s lunch on a leaking Liberian lugger. Further south than a tired Tasmanian’s toe-jam tucker-bag take-away.

But hey, when you’re deeper and down as that, my friends, the only way is up. You can’t just sit there on your sorry ass, waiting for the wind of fortune to blow in your direction.

You have to lift yourself high above adversity.

You have to make your own wind.

“Holy humdinger,” flustered Fangio, fanning his face with his fat. “If you make wind in my bar one more time, Laz, I’ll kick your sorry ass out.” Oh how we laughed.

“I’m not kidding,” the fat boy flustered further. “I put up with a lot from you, Laz. The running gags about your trenchcoat and your trusty Smith and West Bromwich Albion. The dame that does you wrong always bopping you on the head in my bar. And you calling me the fat boy all the time. But I do draw the line at you making wind. I’m running a business here.”

“But you are a very fat boy,” says I, faster than a ferret in a felcher’s footbath.

“ And those dumb surrealistic metaphor jobbies you insist on using all the time because you think it gives you your own style. The ones that gradually get more and more obscene and obscure and are neither funny nor clever.”

“Ease up, Porkie,” says I. “I may be down, but I’m far from out.”

“Do you want to settle your tab?”

“I’m out,” says I. “You have me there.”

Oh how we laughed again.

“By the by, Laz,” says Fangio to me, when the laughter has died down once more in the bar that bares his name. “I’ve been thinking of taking up a hobby. Is there anything you’d recommend to me?”

“How about slimming?” I offered in ribald recommendation.

“Would that involve eating less?” asked Fangio. “Because as you know I gorge like a pig, for it’s my only pleasure.”

“Rubber bondage?”

“Well, almost my only pleasure. I was thinking of something cerebral that required next to no exercise, cost but a penny or two and could win me a first prize at the annual bartenders’ orchid-breeding competition.”

“How about orchid-breeding, then?”

“What, with my back? Come off it.”

“Hang-gliding?”

“Too high.”

“Bass-playing?”

“Far too low.”

“Asking after the good health of folk?”

“Fair to middling. Mustn’t grumble.”

“How about a card game?” says I.

“Not with you, you cheating Arab.”

“No, not with me, Fange. How about taking up a card game as a hobby?”

“Well,” the fat boy stroked at his chins and a bird blew by in Brooklyn. “I used to play cards a lot when I was a grunt in ’Nam.”

“You’re still a grunt in my book, Fange.”

“Thanks very much, my friend.”

“So,” says I. “Card games it is. What kind of card game do you fancy?”

The Fange gave his chins another stroke for luck and asked, “What games do you know?”