Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Six Sentence Story bloghop

Denise is the host.

This week’s Six Sentence Story rightly falls into the category: ‘summer writing assignment’. (My efforts to learn to write good has lead/brought-me-to/forced-an-acceptance that I need to do the extra assignments. Had I only taken the years and years of English, composition and grammar classes more seriously, this would not be necessary. But I didn’t and it is.)

This week, the assignment is to write a Six in the story-world of Ian Devereaux, the detective in my first-person detective story, ‘The Case of the Missing Starr‘. As you see, I’ve linked the title back to the story, in case you want to check out the backstory. If you go, we meet Dr. Leanne Thunberg in Chapter 4.

(PS my tertiary rogerian aspect* insists that I state: ‘This is a new story. Perhaps better to say, a glimpse into the lives that continue, even when the Reader absent, for surely all good characters live somewhere in the multiverse.)

The prompt word is:

FABRIC

“For a private investigator who divides his day between lunch with members of the underworld at a strip club and seeing clients in an office two doors down from a pawn shop, you come across very much at home here,” Dr. Leanne Thunberg, despite being a head shorter than my six feet, lead me across Harvard Yard, without once turning to make sure I followed.

I’d met Leanne last year, on a missing persons assignment and, despite her being the chair of the Department of Advanced Anthropology and Cultural Semiotics, we clicked; she had a Noomi Rapace thing going on and we all know that any self-respecting cobra falls in love with the mongoose, if only for a brief moment.

She’d emailed me an invitation to come to Cambridge, saying only she had a problem best served by talking to a private investigator; I stopped by her office and, with a smile, she informed me she had reservations at a new restaurant, ‘Craigie on Main’ that she was certain I would enjoy; Leanne had a way of making promises that carried the undertone of a dare.

The restaurant was everything she promised and, accepting her suggestion we have a drink at her home in West Cambridge, I found myself wondering who, among the founders of most established religions, was shrewd enough to insist that the devil was a man.

“Are you familiar with the story of Adam’s first wife?”

The whisper of silk drowned out all other thought and, not for the first time, I was amazed at how such an expensive fabric can be so costly; in the dark it sounded like both the cry of love and whisper of danger; I gave up all hope to steer the night, at least until dawn.

Music

* one of the three ‘personality types’ of the Wakefield Doctrine. The majority of (commercially) successful authors are rogers. They tell their stories with rounded-word, incessantly familiar prose that is easily read without risk of consequences. Words of the Herd, one might say