SHOW NOTES:
You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The same is
true for your fictional characters. So, make them vivid and memorial. How do
you do this? There are many ways. Let's explore a few of them.
Riding the Rap--Elmore Leonard
Ocala Police picked up Dale Crowe Junior for weaving, two o'clock in the
morning, crossing the center line and having a busted tail light. Then while
Dale was blowing a point-one-nine they put his name and date of birth into the
national crime computer and learned he was a fugitive felon, wanted on a
three-year-old charge of Unlawful Flight to Avoid Incarceration. A few days
later Raylan Givens, with the Marshals Service, came up from Palm Beach County
to take Dale back and the Ocala Police wondered about Raylan.
How come he was a federal officer and Dale Crowe Junior was wanted on a
state charge. He told them he was with FAST, the Fugitive Apprehension Strike
Team, assigned to the Sheriff's Office in West Palm. And that was pretty much
all this Marshall said. They wandered too, since he was alone, how you'd be
able to drive and keep an eye on his prisoner. Dale Crowe Junior had been
convicted of a third-degree five-year felony, Battery of a Police Officer, and
was looking at additional time on the fugitive warrant. Dale Junior might feel
he had nothing to lose on this trip so. He was a rangy kid with the build of a
college athlete, bigger than this marshal in his blue suit and cowboy boots --
the marshal calm though, not appearing to be the least apprehensive. He said
the West Palm strike team were shorthanded at the moment, the reason he was
alone, but believed he would manage.
The Long Goodbye--Raymond Chandler
When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the
living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel
Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the
shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the
banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long
completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else
is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people
were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels
or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and
murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse
or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a
city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of
emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is.
I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed.
Trouble Is My Business-Raymond Chandler
(Marlowe meets Harriett Huntress-Chapter 3)
She wore a street dress of pale green wool and a small cockeyed hat that
hung on her left ear like a butterfly. Her eyes were wide set and there was
thinking room between them. Their color was lapis-lazuli blue and the color of
her hair was dusky red, like a fire under control but still dangerous. She was
too tall to be cute. She wore plenty of make-up in the right places and the
cigarette she was poking at me had a built-on mouthpiece about three inches
long. She didn't look hard, but she looked as if she had heard all the answers
and remembered the ones she thought she might be able to use some time.
The Neon Rain-James Lee Burke
My partner was Cletus Purcel. Our desks faced each other in a small room
in the old converted fire station on Basin Street. Before the building was a
fire station it had been a cotton warehouse, and before the Civil War slaves
had been kept in the basement and led up the stairs into a dirt ring that
served both as an auction arena and a cockfighting pit.
Cletus's face looked like it was made from boiled pigskin, except there
were stitch scars across the bridge of his nose and through one eyebrow, where
he'd been bashed by a pipe when he was a kid in the Irish Channel. He was a big
man, with sandy hair and intelligent green eyes, and he fought to keep his
weight down, unsuccessfully, by pumping iron four nights a week in his garage.
"Do you know a character named Wesley Potts?" I asked.
"Christ, yes. I went to school with him and his brothers. What a family.
It was like having bread mold as your next-door neighbor."
"Johnny Massina said this guy's talking about pulling my plug."
"Sounds like bullshit to me. Potts is a gutless lowlife. He runs a dirty
movie house on Bourbon. I'll introduce you to him this afternoon. You'll really
enjoy this guy."
