So here we have my homage to Raymond Chandler, with a little bit of H.P. Lovecraft thrown in for good measure. I know what you're thinking: "that's an awful lot of casual, era-authentic racism to squeeze into one story" — but I think I've managed it.
(And I've also started putting the links to the story before the spoiler-tastic discussion. Go me! It's almost a shame that no one ever reads these posts.)
So I hope you're all familiar with The Big Sleep, and the little piece of attendant lore concerning the death of Owen Taylor, the Sternwood's chauffeur. The story goes that the writers working on the screenplay adaptation — including Leigh "I'm the reason Empire is the best film in the trilogy" Brackett — wrote to Chandler, asking for confirmation as to who killed Taylor. Chandler thought about it for a while and then wrote back that, to be honest, he wasn't quite sure himself.
I'd been wanting to tackle this mystery for five or six years, but it was only at the end of last year that how to tackle it — with the Lovecraftian angle — occurred to me. I'll admit that my main inspiration there came from Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald, which does something similar, introducing Sherlock Holmes to the Great Old Ones.
I hope I've managed to give the narrator something of a Chaldler-esque voice without straying to far into pastiche or parody. It runs pretty close at the beginning, but I think I reined it in by the end.
I also hope that you all found the startling reveal at the end as enjoyable to read as I found it to write.
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