Smiling Gnome

by J. Michael Major

About the Author: J. Michael Major is a member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Horror Writers Association. His crime novel ONE MAN'S CASTLE won the 2014 Lovey Readers Choice Award for Best First Novel. More than three dozen stories have appeared in such anthologies as Splatterlands, DeathGrip 3: It Came From the Cinema, and New Traditions in Terror, and such magazines as Weirdbook, Hardboiled, Bare Bone, Into the Darkness, Pirate Writings, and many more. Find out more about J. Michael at www.jmichaelmajor.com.

Excerpt

Some things a private investigator learns the hard way: Never blow your retainer on a hot e-mail tip. Never forget your cell phone can be monitored or tracked. And never, ever take a case involving a dead writer.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against writers. They’re a little flighty sometimes, but otherwise okay. It’s when they start spouting off about universal truths or other similar crap that I tune them right out. Maybe Shakespeare or Hemingway found those rare combinations of words that struck a timeless chord; but when you got right down to it, they were just peddling their wares. And except for Salman Rushdie or Papa’s self-inflicted cranial pizza recipe, no one ever held a gun to their heads for what they wrote.

Just try explaining that to the grieving relatives. No matter how much you tell them otherwise, every single one is convinced there was a conspiracy over something their loved ones wrote. You end up wasting time reading all their boring stories, searching for hidden truths that got them in a jam—when all along the evidence points straight to a drunken argument or the fact that he’d been boning the neighbor’s wife, just like the cops had said.

So when Melissa LaVoie called my cell phone and asked me to take the case involving her dead brother, the famous local writer, I did what I always do: I jumped at the chance. After all, I’m only peddling my own wares.

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