By Albert Tucher
In the summer of 2000 I signed up on a whim for
a fiction writing class at the Union County College in Cranford, NJ. Our
teacher, Tom Cantillon, gave us weekly writing assignments, and one week he had
us write an action story. From somewhere came a mental picture of a man and a
woman standing by a car parked on the shoulder of a deserted highway.
So far, so noir, but who were they? I decided
that they were a cop and a prostitute, and just to keep things interesting, I
made her the good guy. He wanted to kill her, and she needed to stop him.
I couldn’t think of a motive that would play in
1,500 words, until I made the police officer a woman also. The motive became
jealousy over a man who had been paying Diana—I knew her name immediately—and
ignoring the officer.
The story turned out well, but I realized that
it was open-ended enough to become the beginning of something bigger. It is now
the first chapter in my currently unpublished novel Do Overs. For a long time that book was the beginning of Diana’s
main story arc.
But it proved a tough sell, even after my friend
and colleague Elaine Ash, aka Anonymous-9, did some needed major surgery on it.
Elaine suggested that it had too much challenging material, including a cop
killing and some hard-edged, explicit sex, to be the reader’s introduction to
the Diana saga. She wondered whether I had a story that could come before Do Overs.
In fact, I had a novella with a solid noir
premise: a John Doe turns up after ten years in a shallow grave, with nothing
to identify him except Diana’s phone number freakishly preserved in his pocket.
The number is one that she used only briefly, when she was just weeks into her
career as a prostitute. Rather than give the police a list of her
clients—certain death for her business—she decides to investigate, with results
that could be fatal for her.
That story came in at 16,000 words. Elaine read
it and said that it needed more. For starters, it needed the viewpoint of
Detective Dale Tillotson, who has appeared in many of my short stories, and
whose friendship with Diana is tested by the case. I also realized that the
story is about the return of old mistakes and old enemies which gave me my
title, The Same Mistake Twice. The
theme also enabled me to rethink and reuse some material from Do Overs that had ended up on the
cutting room floor. The result came in at 31,000 words, and Jay Hartman at
Untreed Reads said that accepting the story for publication was “a no-brainer.”
I love it when that happens. The confusion lifts,
and I have to think hard to remember what it felt like. Next time, why don’t I
just skip the hard part and go straight to the good stuff?
Let me make a note of that.
