Whodunit?

by Dan Anderson

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ISBN 978-0-9837552-3-4






 
At book signings and conferences, readers approach me and ask “Where did you come up with Chauncey McFadden? He is one of the most unusual and therefore interesting detectives found in fiction.” You’d think I’d have a pat response ready, but Chauncey isn’t a protagonist that leaped forth from a sudden rush of imagination. Rather he gradually grew on me over time, like a polyp in your colon.

I had been a reader of detective suspense fiction since being exposed to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew at an early age. As I grew into a more mature reader, I progressed to the older masters of mystery like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Earl Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, and Ellery Queen. Each of them offered a novel concept of a PI and staked new territory in the burgeoning field of detective suspense fiction. Chauncey is my contribution to this genre and is another step in the pyramid of crime-solvers crafted and honed by writers or whodunits.

Our detective is a shrewd observer of the human condition and uses humor to disarm and disengage from peril. He is an everyman who lives a marginal existence in a profession that offers little in the way of financial success if you’re honest. An ex-high school teacher and museum guard, he stumbled into the PI profession because of its freedom of action and escape from the stultifying oppression of corporate bureaucracy. He has little in the way of homicide experience, but in each installment of The McFadden Chronicles he manages to apprehend the villains and do right by his clients.

“Where do you get the ideas for your plots?” is another common question. Killing Me Softly With Your Love” was my effort to make “mystery history.” Since the beginning of time, people have been murdered in every way imaginable—guns, knives, poison, hanging¸ run over by cars, pushed over cliffs, thrown overboard from boats ... well, you get it. My first mystery, however, is the first in which female victims were dispatched by vibrators. (Not all the benefits of our technological age have been employed as intended by the inventor.) Although this modus operandi connotes a gory, sexually-charged plotline, nothing of the sort appears in Killing Me Softly With Your Love.

The inspiration for Black Magic Woman, the second installment in the series (to be published), came from a two-week cruise of the Caribbean that my wife and I took some years ago. Passenger activities on the cruise vessel and different geography and culture in the ports of call begged for mystery development.

Eye of the Tiger, the third installment (to be published), addresses contemporary murders that revenge an atrocity that occurred in Vietnam during its war. As a member of the Americal Infantry Division, it was quite easy for me to take observations and folklore grounded in military experience and fictionalize them for reader entertainment.

Take This Job and Shove It, the fourth installment (to be published), involves the mysterious murders of former employees of a large financial corporation. Having worked for such an organization for three decades, the development of the plotline was for me as natural and easy as breathing.

All mysteries to date, except one, take place in Los Angeles, a veritable mother lode of outré people and crucible of cultural phenomena. Since I now live in Henderson, NV, in future adventures I may relocate Chauncey to Las Vegas, the undisputed realm of habitués and other behavioral eccentrics.