I’m old school?trenchcoats, bowler hats, sunglasses, a suit, and well-shined shoes that click loudly when I walk on pavement.
It’s almost cliché. I carry a briefcase, my car’s windows are tinted so that I can see out, but no one can see in. I sit in coffee shops across from the next soon-to-be crime scene, plotting.
If I had it my way I’d be undetectable and nonchalant. Incognito. I almost give myself away, but the detectives in this carefully constructed world of letters and ink, who also wear bowler hats and trenchcoats, are coincidentally very unassuming.
I can’t control any of this. We’ve been outlined, all of us, character trait by character trait, ever since she began to write this novel.

“It’s too simple.”
“Simple? How can it be simple? It’s a murder mystery!” Pamela snatched up her purse and followed the man to his office door, determined not to be pushed out. “It’s a bestseller. Tell me, Mr. Cluster, how is it that my book is a bestseller if it’s too simple?”
“Most people like simple. They think that it’s just their lives that are complicated and it’s an escape to read about a world where both the villain and the detectives wear trenchcoats.”
“Then it’s simple, but pleasing,” Pamela smirked. “I’m giving them what they want. So why is my book only given a ? star rating in your paper?”
“It’s not what the true intellects want. And that matters most, doesn’t it? Get people who actually think to think when they read your book, to find the hidden gem and to act on it.”
“But most of the population aren’t true intellects, Mr. Cluster,” Pamela pleaded. “So I give 10% of the population something to mull over or I give 90% of the population an escape to another world.”
“Did JK Rowling give the population an escape to another world?” the newspaper editor asked. “Maybe. But it wasn’t a good escape, seeing as how they’d be killed by Voldemort.”
“I don’t see your point.”
“But she gave everyone something to think about. Months after they finish the book, it’ll keep coming back to them. They’ll learn something new each time they read Harry Potter.”
“We’re getting nowhere on this point, so let’s go back to the old one,” Pamela suggested. “I don’t see how the world I wrote about is unrealistic at all.”
“How will you get home after we’ve finished discussing how I won’t change my mind on your book’s review, Ms. Ville?”
“My car’s here, of course. My chauffeur is waiting for me.”
“Exactly. Your reality is portrayed flawlessly in your book. You’ve written a world where no one takes the tube home or waits in the rain for a taxi. No one has to walk home in the snow because they lost their wallet and can't pay to take the bus. You need to write about a real world, Ms. Ville.”
Pamela Ville was completely outraged. She stuttered the beginnings of a few sentences, but a coherent one never managed to slip out of her mouth. The editor motioned back into his office and held the door open for her, seeing that this conversation was going to take longer than he had hoped. Besides, his employees were starting to peer around their desks to see what was happening with the elaborately dressed woman who had arrived so elegantly.
Once inside the office, Pamela found her voice.
“What do you want me to do, then?” she asked weakly. “My publisher likes my book. He wants another one...a sequel. What do I do?”
“Well, Ms. Ville, I don’t know if I should offer my advice since you don’t seem to like to hear it.”
“No. I’ll listen this time. Honestly.” Pamela plopped down into the leather easy chair in front of the big oak desks. Interns, on their way past the office with coffees and bagels to deliver to the columnists, peers through the office windows, hoping to see Pamela screaming berserkly at Mr. Custer, one of the most renowned editors in London.
“Don’t write a murder mystery that takes place in a fairytale world,” he suggested. “Go out and live a little.”

The stoplights change red just when you don’t want them to. I’ve left my bowler hat and trenchcoat at home, buried deep in the back of my closet. You’d never guess that I was the villain except for every night after the ten o’clock news, I pull the blackout curtains down and blow out the lamp, sliding the locks on the door into place and hoping that they never find me out.