First Line — The Last Collar
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This is the first line of The Last Collar, my first collaboration with Larry Kelter.
Full disclosure — I didn’t write this line, Larry did. But I think it is a great in media res opener. You’re right there on the scene, and you can see it clearly.
I give it a solid B+, but then as you’ve seen in this First Line series, I’m a tough grader.
You?
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This book was actually an interesting one to work on from a craft perspective. It was far from my first collaboration — in fact, part of the reason Larry sought me out had to do with my collaborative experience — but it was the first that didn’t follow the dual first person narrative with alternating chapters. No, in this book, we went with a single first person narrative, and I have to say, I had some trepidation. Not that it wouldn’t be good (check out Larry’s other books, and you’ll know why I was not worried about that) but that the voice of John Moccia, the protagonist, would be fractured or schizophrenic.
Turns out I was completely wrong. Because Larry and I heavily edited each other as we wrote this, and during the revision process, our singular fingers ended up in just about every pie in this book. By the time it was done, there was a singular voice. Not mine, not Larry’s, but a single voice. And honestly, coming up on two years later, if you put me to the test on about 80% of the text, I wouldn’t be able to say for sure if I wrote that, or just edited it. I think Larry is in the same boat. Sure, there’s another twenty percent that I’m sure of — a phrase I definitely know Larry wrote, or a piece of dialogue I’m pretty sure was mine, but the majority of the book falls under the heading of ours, not mine or yours.
If you’re counting at home, I think my first original contribution to this book was in the opening chapter. Larry definitely wrote the opening chapter, but like I said, we heavily revised and edited each other’s chapters. Four pages in, we get this gem:
“Well look at you getting all Vogue on me. Who knew you were such an expert on women’s hygiene.
What do you use for vaginal itch?”
He grabbed his crotch. “I got the cure right here.”
“More like the cause, ain’t it?”
Let’s remember, this is a procedural, and these are longtime detective partners… so no angry letters, m’kay?
The Last Collar is a dark book in many ways. It’s funny, too, at times, at least in short segments. The partner relationship really works, at least according to feedback I’ve heard. And although we tried to write a compelling mystery, for my money the mystery is secondary to the journey Moccia is taking. It is certainly the darker aspect of the book. But despite the grim nature of much of the book, the ending always seemed to me to be an uplifting one. In fact, it was the ending that inspired the publisher to go with the book cover they did.
Larry and I would go on to write another book together, with a slightly different approach. And writing these two novels with him really helped to expand my collaboration chops. I couldn’t have written Charlie-316 with Colin Conway the way we did without my experiences working on The Last Collar and Fallen City with Larry.
Everything in our lives ties together, doesn’t it? And a river runs through it.
Source: All The Madness In My Soul
