The Book of Murder Book

Bla bla I'm a male author, bla bla here's my male editor and I talking about writing and I drop a bit show-don't-tell of info hinting at what kind of person he is, bla bla, here's pages of detail about the writing and habits of the other male author being set up as the villain and I drop a bit of info hinting at what kind of person (I think) he is in the same way.

The first woman on the scene:

I phoned her'a calm, cheerful, polite voice'as soon as I got back to my flat, and we arranged to meet. When I went down to let her in I found a tall, slim girl, with a serious yet smiling face, high forehead, brown hair drawn back into a ponytail.

Attractive? Very attractive, and terribly young'she looked like a first-year student, just out of the shower. Jeans and a loose blouse, coloured wristbands on one wrist, trainers with a star print. We smiled at each other without speaking in the narrow confines of the lift: very white, even teeth, hair still a little damp at the ends, scent…Inside my apartment, we soon agreed hours and pay. She sat down quite casually at the computer, dropping her small handbag beside her, and making the chair swivel gently with her long legs as we talked. Brown eyes, an intelligent, quick, sometimes cheerful look. A serious yet smiling face.

... oh good, "terribly young". That's always a promising beginning to a novel's description of its first female character in conjunction with how attractive she is to the main male character. Hey, uh, remember how her hair was up in a ponytail? And they were smiling at each other in the elevator, indicating that they were facing each other? And he mentions her hair is IN A PONYTAIL?

So is that bad writing or is this guy just taking creepy starting to a WHOLE NEW LEVEL?

That first day she took dictation for two straight hours. She was fast, sure and, as an added miracle, made no spelling mistakes. Her hands on the keyboard hardly seemed to move. She adapted straight away to my voice and pace, and never lost the thread. Perfect, then, in every way? At almost thirty, I was starting to look with cruel melancholy into women's futures and I couldn't help noticing other things about her. Her hair, starting high on her forehead, was very fine and brittle and if you looked down on her from above (I dictated standing up), her parting was a little too wide. Also her jawline was not as firm as one might have wished, a slight fleshiness at her throat threatening in time to become a double chin. And before she sat down I noticed that from the waist down she suffered from the characteristic Argentinian asymmetry, as yet only incipient, of excessive hips. But all this lay far in the future, and for now her youth overcame any flaws.

Fuck you. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck everything about this entire fucking paragraph of "did I mention she was hot, but also not hot?"



As I opened the first notebook to begin dictating, she straightened her back in the chair and I confirmed, with disappointment, what I had suspected: her blouse fell straight over a completely flat chest.





But might this not have been a convenient defence for Kloster, perhaps a decisive one? As I had recently found out, Kloster was married, and he would have had trouble introducing an eighteen-year-old nymphet

DING DING DING THIRTY YEAR OLD USING THE PHRASE "TERRIBLY YOUNG" JUST BEFORE DESCRIBING HER BODY IN GREEEEEEEEAT DETAIL (AND USING THE WORD 'NYMPHET', ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME) (AND IT GETS WORSE BELOW) CONFIRMED. How DID I know that was a bad sign? I must be fucking psychic.





We now return you to our interrupted paragraph of creepiness. Well, one of them.

to his wife if the girl had generous curves as well. But above all, if the writer wanted to work undistracted, wasn't it a perfect arrangement? He had the youthful grace of her profile, which he could calmly admire while he worked, whilst avoiding any sexual tension that might have come from another, more dangerous contour? I wondered if Kloster had made this kind of calculation, this kind of secret deliberation. I wondered'as Pessoa had'if it was only I who was so vile, 'vile in the literal sense of the word'. In any case, I approved of his choice.

Or maybe he's capable of having professional relationships with women and you aren't and THAT'S why you were so weirded out earlier by the revelation that he did have a wife and kid.

Ha ha, who am I kidding, with this introduction, he's probably also a creepy asshole. Also I love that self-acknowledged "yup, I'm vile" one sentence acknowledgment of how gross he is before he goes back to talking about his penis's opinion of her body.

Oh but don't worry, his character also learns about her as a person after ogling her body for several hours!

Or maybe do worry, because it gets WORSE.

I was sufficiently intrigued by him to be able to wait until she and I had got to know each other better, but I did find out, as she gathered cups and saucers in the kitchen, almost everything I would ever know about Luciana. She was indeed at university, in her first year. She was studying biology but was thinking of changing subject. Mummy, daddy, an older brother in his final year of medicine, a much younger sister, aged seven, mentioned with an ambivalent smile, as if she were an endearing pest. A grandmother who'd been in an old people's home for some time. A boyfriend discreetly slipped into the conversation, without actually mentioning his name, with whom she'd been going out for a year. Had she slept with the boyfriend? I made a few cynical remarks and she laughed. I decided she had, definitely.

"Here's your tell-don't-show checklist of the female character my male character is getting set up to bang or at least want to bang, and okay we're done, now back to talking about her body by asking her who she's fucked!"

AND IT STILL KEEPS GOING. I mean I could pretty much just copy and paste the entire section of chapter 1 that's about her that I read before giving up, and it'd demonstrate more of the above. He fantasizes about her. He asks her intrusive questions about her relationship with the other author as well, bringing it - well before chapter 1 is over - to a total of 2 men he's tried to find out an 18 year old's sexual history with. I'm done. Well before chapter 1 is over, I'm sooooo done.