Murder by Burger – Weird Beginnings

In 1988, I started a novel called Men In Weird Shirts. About ten pages into a story that was going nowhere because all I really had was what I thought was a catchy title, I scrapped the project and started a novel called BigCrunch (that was somehow inspired by the Weird Shirts story) about a French detective bloodhound called Fleeh Beaugt (or something like that – it was a pun) who solved cases with the help of a kid who had built the world’s most powerful computer in his parents’ basement. The dog spoke a mixture of French Canadianese and NewfieSpeak. It took thirty pages to convince me that I was writing drivel again.

I couldn’t shake the idea of the dog though. Then, a few months later, I was reading Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story of McDonald’s. Like a flash of lightning straight up the ass, the idea came to me. Barto Burger. Cloned hamburgers. A corporate structure more religion than business. A murder. A French detective bloodhound to solve the case.

It was an on-and-off again thing for years. I wrote three novels before I finally came back to the original research. The French detective bloodhound disappeared somewhere in the plotting and characterization phases, but the burgers and mayhem in a corporate headquarters building fashioned after the giant Gothic churches of Europe and the idea for a truly weird detective-like character grew into Boston Jonson, CI Extraordinaire.

But it still wasn’t a smooth trip. Sixty some odd pages in, I started to lose the thread of the story. I put it aside and wrote short fiction and marketing stuff for about two years before coming back with the rest of the story somehow worked out in the back of my head deep under layers of subconscious gray matter and daydreams.

Today, I’m about twenty pages away from the end of Murder by Burger. There’s a lot of story in and behind the story. That’s what this blog is about.

Next: Murder on eBay

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