While thinking about what might work as subject material for a detective story, I happened to think of an old friend who is an over-the-top classic movie buff, although our definitions of what counts as classic differ somewhat—he has many more Westerns on his list than I do on mine. How would he react to encountering a group of stars on a street corner?
My own introduction to the stars I would eventually cast in “Double Take” came through Saturday afternoon television when I was a kid. I was especially fond of the screwball comedies: Bringing Up Baby, Arsenic and Old Lace, Adam’s Rib, Sullivan’s Travels, You Can’t Take it With You, It Happened One Night, The Man Who Came to Dinner, To Be or Not to Be, and of course all the Marx Brothers movies, which were zany beyond the category of screwball comedy.I also had a few favorites that leaned toward noir, particularly Bogart and Bacall pairings. Best of all were those films featuring wit and plays on words. My hope for “Double Take“ was for it to be a blend of the two—screwball noir.
But something felt wrong about writing in a fictional way about real people, even though those people were all dead. Perhaps they were just too close in recent memory. My experience of them, of course, was only of their public personas. I needed the freedom for my characters to behave and be in ways that those real people hadn’t behaved or been. I needed faces divorced from real personalities; if their projected screen personalities shone through, that would be a plus, adding to the reader’s perception of the character.
Faces divorced from personality is what I got by making them celebrity doubles (since that’s revealed right at the start of the story I don’t think saying it here counts as a spoiler).
I started out knowing who did it and why. But that’s not how it worked out. I can’t point to a moment when I decided it should be different, it just became different on its own and surprised me. I’m not the first writer to discover that characters sometimes have minds of their own.
And while it is definitely fiction, a lot of the setting is accurate fact. Since it’s been many years since I’ve spent any significant amount of time in Manhattan, research was necessary. My detective’s specific address isn’t mentioned, but I knew what his building looked like because I had searched and found online an apartment available for rent that he could afford. (Do I hear faint echoes of “Where? Where?” coming from all over New York?) There really is a beer distributorship just a few blocks away in his neighborhood. Several photography studios actually exist on the block where some of the characters worked at a photo shoot. Reality can be a helpful tool in fiction, lending credence to the imagined portions.
“Double Take” was a lot of fun to write and I couldn’t be more pleased that it will appear in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
Trace Evidence 