Brewster McCabe and I have been good pals for the last 30 years. It’s been something of a love/hate relationship, as we haven’t always been on the best of terms.
That happens when you’ve lived with someone for so long. While you relish the core of the relationship and look forward to seeing each other with great regularity, at times you simply want to punch one another out.
If you don’t know who Brewster McCabe is, let me clue you in. He’s a private eye, a Dick, if you will. He’s been stuck in my head and on the “pages” of my computer since 1985.
The good news is that he’s finally come to life in print. If you don’t want to read about our tumultuous relationship any further, feel free to buy the book now. Go ahead, I’ll wait!
Brewster McCabe: Ace Private Eye
In the gritty city of 1985 Seattle, ace private eye Brewster McCabe faces one of the most difficult cases in his career. Amid a circus of quirky characters and unexpected twists and turns, Brewster and his protégé Lionel Finchley must solve a series of crimes before time and endless word play run out.
You can also order the book on amazon.com but I get less of a royalty.
O.K., back to our relationship.
I’m not really sure when Brewster came into my life. I know I was working in the mailroom at Associated Grocers and had tons of time on my hands. I didn’t even have a computer back then. I had to steal time on the company’s mainframe terminals.
The first 10,000 words or so flowed like wine. So did the next 10,000. I didn’t really have any real story in mind. It was just a string of innuendos, plays on words, puns and crazy commentary.
The actual story started to take shape in Key West. I was on vacation with the family and while they went off into town, I settled into a relaxing chair poolside with my Barbie Purse Apple laptop. You remember those, don’t you?
It was a stellar indulgence in fine writing. I can see why Hemingway wrote in Key West. There’s just something about the swaying palms and tropical breeze that spurs your creativity.
I flew through 10,000 more words in a couple of hours. I was so caught up in the amazing story that I had no idea how much time had gone by. It wasn’t until my laptop suddenly shut down that I realized that I had been so immersed in the story, that I forgot to keep track of how much power was left in the battery.
I had also forgotten to do any saving. As the computer powered down, I realized that all that brilliant writing, not to mention the storyline of the entire murder mystery, was gone with it.
I let out a few choice curse words and then flew upstairs to plug the “purse” back in. I hoped against hope that Word had been auto-saving all along. As the computer slowly booted up, I remembered that I had turned that feature off in order to save battery power.
Damn! Ten thousand amazing words and a devilishly brilliant plot that would never see the light of day, let alone an anxious reader’s delight at reading them.
It was the death knell of the Brewster McCabe saga. I just couldn’t pick up where I had left off and I couldn’t remember enough of what I had written in that frenzy to piece the plot back together. All I was left with were puns, word play and shiny-object commentary disguised as a story.
I would visit Brewster in the writer’s morgue occasionally. I would go through the earlier work, tweaking it, doing some editing, but it was like putting makeup on a dead body. It looked good, but it still couldn’t be brought back to life.
Fast forward to 2014. I had finished my Memoirs of a Buccaneer two years earlier and dove right into For the Corporate Good, my corporate thriller. I thought it would be the next book to come out of me and as such, I justified leaving Brewster in the morgue, chalking it up to a good long-form writing exercise.
It was Kat who encouraged me to bring him back to life. I had read her some pages and she loved the character, in part because he’s me – something of a loner who wishes he was a lady’s man but isn’t, who had a semi-successful business, but was extremely loyal to his closest friends, largely because he has abandonment issues and they are all he thinks he has.
One day, I pulled him out of that morgue. I stepped back into his life, breathing new life into his story, a story that turned out to be so much fun to tell that I couldn’t stop writing it, once I figured out where he had to go.
Thirty thousand words, then forty, fifth, sixty, until one day, when I was sitting on the couch, furiously writing Chapter 19, I said, “I’m done. That’s it. That’s the end.”
It had come full circle. Brewster could finally take the bow he deserved for all these years as he defied death, faced his inner demons and found redemption, albeit in a very Brewster way that was as fantastic as it was hilarious.
Brewster is now out in the literary world, standing on his own two feet. I can move onto my corporate thriller finally, knowing that a 30-year writing project is finally done.
Well, finished, but not done. Brewster continues to fill my mind these days. I don’t think he’s done and already his next adventure is brewing in my mind, percolating slowly over low heat. Besides, Kat said he just has to come back. He’s too much fun to leave alone on a shelf without any company.
And who knows, he just may have to have a cameo in For the Corporate Good,, just as I had a cameo in Brewster McCabe: Ace Private Eye. You can find me at Umbertos, and that’s all you need to know.
In the Emerald City, wondering if Brewster is having breakfast at Dirk’s Diner right now,
– Robb