Sonty Mick Untitled Private Eye Story
Written by Sonty Mick
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Chapter One
The Story Begins
My name is Sonty Mick, and I’m a private eye. That’s the kind of person who solves a crime if people pay them to solve it. Sometimes I am out walking around and I see a crime and I know how to solve it, but if nobody pays me then forget it. Like the other day I was at the deli getting a sandwich and there was a sign painter outside painting a sign across the street. While I was eating my tuna and lettuce sandwich (no tomato, tomato is disgusting) I saw another guy walk up and take one of the paint cans that the sign painter had left sitting down at the bottom of the ladder. That is a crime. Not everybody would have seen it, but it’s the kind of thing I am trained to observe. I figured it might be a case, so I went to go talk to the sign painter to see if he’d pay me solve it (even though I already solved it since I saw it happen so I figured it’d be some easy money). But the guy was on a ladder so it took a while for him to understand what I was saying and by then I wasn’t sure where the other guy went who stole the paint so it seemed like it was going to be more trouble than it was worth. I left a bill for the cost of my tuna sandwich since it got soggy while we were talking and then I went on my way.
It’s too bad for the sign painter because later I found the guy who stole the paint can painting another sign around the back of the same store and if I’d been on the case I could have solved the crime. But that is just how life is – sometimes it kicks you in the knees and even if it misses the first time it will keep kicking until it bruises your shins and scuffs your Dockers at least. I know more than a few bad guys who were pretty upset when they got the same treatment from Sonty Mick so don’t laugh too hard or it might happen to somebody you know.
I didn’t tell you what city I live in yet, but really it could be any city. It might be New York or Los Angeles (that is where most cops and private eyes live) or it might be Chicago or San Francisco or another city that has a lot of neighborhoods and some confusing streets. If your city is all one neighborhood, then people can just solve crimes themselves by asking their neighbors who did it. But if there are a lot of neighborhoods, then you don’t know where to start so you need a private eye who can ask people in all of the neighborhoods. Also if there are confusing streets then you need a private eye who can tell you where all the neighborhoods are. That’s why most private eyes get hired by people who are from out of town. A lot of big cities will have that place where two roads with the same name intersect. If you get your purse snatched at the corner of Main Drive and Main Avenue and you don’t hire a private eye then you will probably never see your purse again because you won’t even know what road to look down. Private eyes are trained to know the difference. Main Drive has the Laundromat with the lady who gets mad if you try to wash your car mats in the machines, and Main Avenue has the diner where they won’t let you use photocopies of coupons even if you lost the original one. I bet you had to think a minute to see if I was right. And that minute is all the purse snatcher needs to disappear into the city like a battered perch filet disappearing into a vat of boiling oil at a church fish fry on a Friday night in Lent in the Polish part of town.
I ask you where you are supposed to wash your car mats if you can’t do it at a Laundromat. If I had a washing machine I wouldn’t want all those bits of gravel and mud to come off in mine. That is what we pay people for – to deal with things that we don’t want to deal with.
Like the lady who came into my office last week. If she wanted to deal with her ex-husband blackmailing her then she would have just done it herself. But she didn’t want to deal with it, so she hired me instead. I would tell you about that case but it is not very savory and I haven’t solved it yet. (It was just last week, and I was busy with some other stuff.) There are some details that are not fit for publication in a family book. If I told you about that case, you would have to take this book and put it on the top shelf of your bookcase. And when your kids got to be about eight or nine years old, you would have to move it on top of the refrigerator. In a couple of years you would have to stick it up inside one of the ceiling panels in the basement. (I can’t say exactly when because it depends how tall your refrigerator is and how fast your kids grow.) Then probably when your kids are fifteen or sixteen they would be as tall as you and you would have to just burn the book. Nobody ever made any money telling people to buy books and then burn them. I am making a note to find out why nobody ever made any money doing that because it seems like you could. I’m going to look it up tomorrow but if somebody gets on Wikipedia tonight, just send me an email.
I didn’t tell you what year this story takes place because it could be any year. This is going to be a whole series of books and I don’t want to pin myself down to a particular era. If I say that it is the 1940s then I could never do a story about the Goodyear blimp because those were not good years. Not for blimps anyway. If I say it is the 2000s then I have to write about a lot of science fiction garbage. That stuff is okay sometimes but you have to live in the real world too. It’s exhausting trying to write dialogue for aliens because you have to be careful not to say anything about humans. A lot of words are really related to humans – mankind, manhandle, manslaughter, knucklehead, liplock, eyeball. Try writing a story that doesn’t have any of those words and see how long it takes you. Probably four or five hours longer than it took me. There is another story I wrote about dinosaurs that had the same problem. The bad guy was a tyrannosaurus rex except in the end it turned out that it was really a velociraptor in a tyrannosaurus rex suit (because otherwise he couldn’t have been talking). I’m not going to tell you that one now because I already told you the ending. It probably takes eight weeks to forget something like that so I’ll tell you then.
This is the Sonty Mick private eye code:
Sonty Mick is an award winning private eye. If you don’t believe me, look it up.
Some private eyes shoot first and ask questions later. Sonty Mick doesn’t do either because he’s never wrong so he doesn’t need to.
Nobody escapes Sonty Mick’s long arms.
Nobody makes fun of Sonty Mick’s long arms.
Sorry I couldn't get the numbers to be in the same font as the text but I am doing this in Notepad and I don't think there's a way to fix it.
I gave this book to an editor once and he said that probably only a hundred people would ever buy it and probably all of them would regret it. We argued for a while and then he agreed that maybe one of them wouldn’t regret it. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t. We really don’t know. He is hypothetical. That means he’s not a real person, so we don’t know what he would do. But that’s the difference between Sonty Mick and you. First, Sonty Mick doesn’t regret anything. Second, he’s not hypothetical. Third, he is part of the one percent of people who is smart enough to get this book. It really wears you out writing over other people’s heads all the time but that is the only reason people keep growing.
Think back to when you were a kid. If your older brother wasn’t four inches taller than you and didn’t keep punching you in the shoulder and kidneys, then you wouldn’t have kept growing. You would have just stopped and you’d be about three and a half feet tall today. That’s okay for a six year old kid but not okay for an adult or a private eye. You would need special chairs in your office and it would be hard getting on the city bus. I think you see where I am going with this. Reading this book is like looking up at somebody who is taller than you and who is punching you in the kidneys in an intellectual way. It can be painful and humiliating while it is happening, but maybe after you finish the book you won’t be three and a half feet tall anymore. I’m talking allegorically so if you don’t get it, then ask a hundred people until you find the one who can explain it to you.
I have to write my blog now so I will continue the next chapter of this book tomorrow. I will try to think up a title too while I am working out tonight with dumbbells. That’s a little humor. I’m actually going to be on the exercise bike, but "dumbbells" is what I call the other people in the gym. Write that joke down in your diary and when your grandkids find it in the attic they might think you used to be a stand-up comic and will visit you more often and stop hiding your glasses. I don’t know why, but nobody else is going to tell you these things.
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