Fat Ollie's Book

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Authors: Ed McBain
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Kling said.
    â€œThanks for your time, Gabe. If you happen to hear anything…”
    â€œWhat would I hear?”
    â€œWell, you do have your finger on the community pulse. Maybe somebody saw something, heard something, feels it’s his duty to report it to a community leader…”
    â€œThat’s yet more bullshit,” Foster said. “I’m still a suspect, right?”
    â€œTeach you to sleep alone,” Carella said.

5
    TO TELL THE God’s honest truth, Ollie was more interested in finding whoever had stolen his book than he was in finding whoever had murdered Lester Henderson. Toward that end, he had already coerced the Mobile Crime Unit into coming all the way uptown to dust his car for prints, the operative theory being that the perp hadn’t been wearing gloves on a nice spring day, and had therefore left tell-tale evidence all over the place.
    Sure.
    That was for fiction.
    The MCU boys hadn’t come up with anything at all—which didn’t surprise Ollie, those jackasses—but which still left somebody out there who had smashed Ollie’s car window (in plain view of the deaf, dumb, and blind blues standing outside King Memorial, don’t forget) and reached in to unlock the door and run off with Ollie’s precious manuscript. He didn’t think anyone up here knew how to read, so he didn’t suppose they could discern he or she was looking at something written by a police officer, which if it wasn’t returned pronto, could put his or her ass in a sling.
    The dispatch case bearing the manuscript had been a gift from Isabelle two Christmases ago. Like everything else his dumb sister ever gave him, he’d had no use for it until he placed his book inside it to carry to Kinko’s. He figured the only use the thief had for the case was to hock it, so he’d already sent out a flier to all the hock shops in the Eight-Eight and neighboring precincts. Junkies—if indeed a junkie had stolen it—were territorial by nature and basic by instinct.
    In the three months it had taken him to write the book, he had learned a lot about so-called mystery fiction. After he’d thrown away his first feeble attempts at Bad Money, he’d started all over again by reading most of the crap on the bestseller list, much of it written by ladies who were not now, nor had ever in their entire lives been cops or private eyes or medical examiners or game wardens or bounty hunters, or any of the other things they professed to be. He then began reading all the book reviews posted on Amazon Dot Com.
    Before he himself got on the Web, he used to think Amazon Dot Com was a very large broad named Dorothy Kahm. Now he knew better. To him, the reviews on this bookselling site seemed like the book reports he had to write when he was in the sixth grade. In fact, the reviews on Amazon seemed to be written by soccer moms who’d never been to school at all, it looked like, who were also not cops or private eyes or anything else, and who weren’t very good writers in the bargain. He wondered why Amazon, presumably in the business of selling books, would post bad reviews about books they were trying to sell, but hey, that was their business. Besides, these so-called book reviews were very informative to Ollie.
    What he learned from them was that any book with more than half a dozen characters in it, or more than a single plot line, was too confusing to be understood by some hick down there in Green Beans, Georgia, or out there in Saddle Sores, Texas. The answer was simplicity. Keep it simple. If simpletons were out there reading mystery fiction or detective fiction or crime fiction or thrillers or whatever anyone chose to call these so-called stories, then anybody actually writing the stuff had better learn how to keep it simple. Simplicity for the simpletons.
    Simple.
    So what he’d done was to scrap the literary approach he’d formerly been striving for in

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