What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (12 page)

KILLING ME SOFTLY

There are some things that the two of you may have in common, of course. You both may smoke Cuban cigars. You both may drink Jameson Irish whiskey. But, after a time, the bad outweighs the good. It doesn't take long to discover, for instance, that the real you and the fabricated you both seem to lust after the same kind of woman. Once a woman's imagination has been captured by a fictional heartthrob, the flesh-and-blood version has a hard act to follow. I'm not the first novelist who's felt the need to kill a character better known and better regarded than he is.

In 1893
The Final Problem
recorded the passing of the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes. The man who offed Holmes was the same man who created him, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Why did it have to end this way, with Holmes and his archenemy, Moriarty, representing the forces of good and evil in the world, struggling in each other's grasp, then plunging to their deaths at Reichenbach Falls? Was Conan Doyle weary of his celebrated sleuth, or was the author in such a petulant snit about being eclipsed by his invention that he murdered him in a fit of literary pique? Or did Conan Doyle destroy Holmes because, as Oscar Wilde famously wrote, "each man kills the thing he loves"? The difference between the artist and the murderer, Holmes himself once said, is that the artist knows when to stop. My latest mystery,
Ten Little New Yorkers,
will also be my last. It's not that I'm fresh out of mad nights or candle wax or typewriter ribbons; it's merely that I'm running low on the desperation that makes a writer good in the first place. The mystery field, one quickly discovers, is as narrow as it is deep: The elements that are essential to a mystery are the same ones that often keep it trite and limited. As an author, you're constantly trying to fool the reader without cheating him. Your best writing is rarely about smoke and mirrors or the corpse in the library. More often it deals with the dreams of a detective who wonders if there's life before death. The mystery of life, in other words, is a greater and more compelling story than the cheap, dog-eared mystery of death. Life is hanging on tight, spurring hard, and letting 'er buck. Death is merely letting go of the saddle horn.

When I wrote my first mystery,
Greenwich Killing Time,
in 1984, I never dreamed the series would continue for more than twenty years. Long before that, I suspected, the reader would tire of my cleverness. I hoped, naturally, that there would be more than one reader, and in time my hopes were realized.

Today my mysteries have been translated into more languages than there are books in the series, including, recently, Russian, Hebrew, and Japanese. I can't imagine what these people think when they read them. Then again, I can't imagine what I was thinking when I wrote them.

In
Ten Little New Yorkers,
Manhattan is victimized by a string of vicious murders. Not much of a plot, you might say, but when you've written as many of these boogers as I have, you begin to understand why plots are for cemeteries. And speaking of cemeteries, it was clearly time to plant Kinky Friedman and his colorful band of flatulent friends. If I didn't kill him soon, I knew I ran the risk of becoming a literary hack—a bitter, jaundiced, humorless, insular, constipated prig, like most successful authors. I preferred to stay the way I'd always been: obliviously well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Having decided to do away with Kinky Friedman, one nagging question remained: Which Kinky should I kill? The character, with his bizarre behavior, tediously eccentric mannerisms, and cloying colloquial language, was now locked in such a hopelessly convoluted love-hate relationship with the author that it might require dental records, or maybe a rectal probe, to tell them apart. The last guy with an invention named for him was Dr. Frankenstein, and everybody knows what happened there. I had created a monster, so now I had to destroy it. So Kinky the cat-loving, cigar-smoking amateur sleuth meets his maker at the end of
Ten Little New Yorkers.
I had no choice; it was spiritual self-defense. Much like the great Holmes, the fictional Kinkster dies in a fall from a bridge while grappling with the murderer. While his death is liberating to me personally, it does not gladden my heart. In an odd sort of way, I was almost starting to like the guy.

If you happen to be a frustrated fan of the fictional Friedman, I can only say that even Conan Doyle was eventually forced by pressure from his readers to bring Holmes back to life. If, indeed, I hear the literary community clamoring for Kinky's return, I may have to follow suit. Sometimes, in my dreams, I think I hear them beginning to clamor. When I wake up to the nonfiction world, however, I realize it was only the sound of one hand clapping.

FICTIONAL CHARACTERS KILLED OFF BY THEIR CREATORS

Sherlock Holmes was a fictional detective of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who first appeared in publication in 1887. He was created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Holmes lived in London and was famous for his genius at solving the most difficult cases with his brilliant use of deductive reasoning and keen observation skills. He had a profound knowledge of chemistry, was a competent cryptanalyst, and was skilled in boxing, swordsmanship, clever disguises, and the violin. Holmes disliked contemplating anything that would clutter up his memory and get in the way of his detective work. He had a flair for showmanship and enjoyed staging dramatic endings to his cases for the benefit of Watson or Scotland Yard. Holmes described himself and his habits as "Bohemian." Holmes' friend and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson, said that Holmes's only vice was an occasional use of cocaine and morphine.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Holmes in "
The Final Problem,"
which appeared in print in 1893. After resisting public pressure to resurrect Holmes, Conan Doyle brought him back to life ten years later and continued to write Holmes stories for a quarter-century longer.

Chewbacca:
Del Rey publishing company won the license to the "Star Wars" books from Bantam a few years ago and decided to launch a new series called "New Jedi Order," based on George Lucas's Star Wars universe. Fantasy writer R. A. Salvatore was chosen to write the first novel in the series,
Vector Prime.
In this book, he killed off Chewbacca, the beloved Wook-iee partner of Han Solo. Lucas gave his approval to Chewbacca's death, but it ignited a storm of controversy from Star Wars fans. Despite this, the book went on to be a best-seller, and Salvatore was subsequently picked to write the novelization of
Star Wars: Episode II—Attack of the Clones.

Hercule
Poirot:
For more than half a century, Dame Agatha Christie was the foremost British writer of mystery novels. Her books have been translated into every major language and her two creations, Detective Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, are world famous. Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective created by Dame Agatha Christie, first appeared in the novel
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
in 1920. He was the main character in more than thirty novels and fifty short stories. Despite Poirot's popularity with her fans, by 1930 Agatha Christie found Poirot "insufferable" and by 1960, she felt that he was a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep."

Still the public loved him, and Christie refused to kill him off, claiming that it was her duty to produce what the public liked, and what the public liked was Poirot. In 1975 a year before her own death, Christie killed off Poirot in the novel
Curtain: Poirot's Last Case.
Poirot died from inevitable complications of a heart condition; by this point in his life he was wearing a wig and a false moustache, and also seemed to be afflicted by arthritis.

Captain America:
The alter ego of Steve Rogers, he was a superhero in the Marvel Comics universe. Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Captain America was one of the most popular characters of Marvel Comics's predecessor, Timely Comics; he made his first appearance in December 1940, a year before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. With his sidekick, Bucky, Captain America faced Nazis, Japanese, and other threats to wartime America. He remained popular throughout the forties but by the early fifties, sales dropped off and Captain America eventually disappeared after 1954. He returned in 1964 when it was explained that in the final days of WWII, Captain America fell from an experimental drone plane into the North Atlantic Ocean and spent decades frozen in a state of suspended animation. During the 1970s, the hero found a new generation of readers as leader of the all-star superhero team the Avengers.

In April 2007, Captain America's alter ego Steve Rogers was shot by a sniper outside of a federal courthouse and later died at the hospital. The character's death was reported on major news outlets like CNN and the Associated Press. His death came as a blow to ninety-three-year-old cocreator Joe Simon, who said, "It's a hell of a time for him to go. We really need him now."