An Interview with Father Black
Father Black is a Private Investigator or a Mr Fix-It in the future urban super-embryo called Monstropolis. He is usually a fictional character, but has now come alive temporarily in our own reality. As I’ve written him into a fabric of fiction many times in short stories, I thought it could be interesting to hear what he has to say now that he is on our side of the reality-fence, so to speak.
Carl Abrahamsson: How do you feel now that you’re in a different reality? The real reality?
Father Black: Well, nothing surprises me much anymore. It’s certainly cleaner here, more well-ordered. But human beings are rotten to the core regardless if it’s here or there or now or then. Things will change, believe me. They will change for the worse.
CA: I’ve often wondered if you, as a fictional character, consciously experience that you have a sentient awareness even when I’m not writing you?
FB: Sure. I can tell when I’m being written and when I’m on my own. It’s frustrating to be written but I’m not stupid. If you hadn’t written me in the first place, I simply wouldn’t have existed. So, hats off, I owe you. Life happens in spurts and bursts for me, when I’m inside a story. I feel considerably more alive when I’m being written.
CA: That’s not at all unlike how I feel when I write. By the way, what is specifically black about Father Black?
FB: My sense of humor? Now, come on. You made it up, remember? Remember Chesterton’s Catholic sleuth Father Brown that you read so diligently when you were young because Borges recommended those stories? Then you revoked that, re-shaped the concept and filtered me through your own Satanic grid. Not a bad idea, if I may say so. The perfect film noir hero: a good guy in a bad place, ready to protect but never to serve. My cynicism is black, my misanthropy is black, my loathing of human illusions and lies is black. I am, quite simply, Father Black.
CA: Yes, I remember now. I have seen so many films noirs and read so much Chandler, Hammett and the rest of them that I must have mutated on some level and created a voice of this hard-boiled synthesis inside my mind. I guess you are that synthesis.
FB: Is that a question?
CA: Not really. Now you sound slightly defensive. Would you rather be made up of more romantic or less violent heroes?
FB: No thanks. I wouldn’t survive a single day in Monstropolis if I were different somehow. Everyone who knows me thinks I’m weird enough as it is. Weird and weak.
CA: Because of the book collecting, you mean? You’re an avid book collector and they can’t understand that.
FB: That’s it. I collect fine editions, subscribe to the Book Collector’s Digest in the story Black Mail, and there’s also the adventure at the Monstropolis Bibliophile Society in that same story.
CA: It’s like a safe haven for you, I guess. An oasis within that big city of nightmares. I remember when I first dreamed up Monstropolis. It was different back then. More like this: “In her mind’s eye she could see the saw-toothed towers of New York climbing slowly up above the horizon before her at the end of a long road. Shimmering there, iridiscent, opalescent, rainbows of chrome and glass and hope. Like Jerusalem, like Mecca, or some other holy spot. Beckoning, offering heaven. And of all things New York has meant to various people at various times – fame, success, fulfillment – it probably never meant as much before as it mean to her tonight: a place of refuge, a sanctaury, a place to be safe in.”
FB: Well, that certainly back-fired, didn’t it? New York is not Monstropolis. It’s like a Kindergarten in comparison. And, by the way, that’s not you at all. That’s Cornell Woolrich, from the story For the Rest of Her Life, published in the May 1968 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and later on made into a TV movie by one of your favorite directors, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in 1974.
CA: There’s no fooling you ever, is there?
FB: I’m Father Black, remember. I may be as much inside your head as you are in mine.
CA: OK then… How important is the actual reading process to you?
FB: I read a lot. It gives me perspective. It makes me cope with all the suffering, violence and deceit I see. To be able to retract into a world of someone else’s imagination is a great comfort for me.
CA: I can totally relate to that. Some of the stories are grisly, to say the least. I’m thinking of Out Of The Frying Pan, for instance. The scene where Father Black encounters the murdered girl… “I approached slowly. The wall was plastered with pictures. The overall collage colour effect was blood red. I watched the pictures while the cops watched me. A young woman was tied to a table with chains, lying on her back with her legs wide apart. Her abdomen has been sliced open, from her sex up to the chest. The bloody skin was sagging, as her body was apparently empty. No entrails, no stomach, no womb. Someone had emptied her out, clean (or not so clean) and simple. I was struck with the precision, amidst all the brutal gore. There was something a little too good about it, too precise, too… Conceived.”
FB: I’ll remember that forever. One of the most horrifying stories I’ve ever been in. I remember thinking that the guy who wrote the story must have a very warped mind.
CA: Well, at least the story had a happy ending.
FB: Certainly not for that girl.
CA: You can’t win them all, I guess. You need to grab the reader’s attention right away. Make them want to stay. If you were to write something yourself, what do you think that would be?
FB: Probably some stories about a middle-aged smart-ass writer, an arm-chair magician with a lot of criticism of the world but not much to show for himself. About how he comes to terms with being middle-aged and lonely.
CA: Hey, that’s getting slightly out of hand. I suggest you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
FB: That’s too late. I already have a life on my own. You gave me life by writing about me.
CA: So now you’re going to write about me suddenly?
FB: I might. Thinking about it.
CA: OK, so would I be a good or a bad guy?
FB: Like me, I suppose. Good at heart, but with a surface of protective cynicism. Pragmatic. Realistic. There’s one big difference though. I’m hard and you’re soft. You wouldn’t survive a day in Monstropolis. In that sense, I’m very much a projection of your own desires and compensations. A tough guy ready to act out and manifest some justice.
CA: Do you think we could meet halfway? If we actually meet inside a story?
FB: Sure. But who would write it if we’re both in it?
CA: Well… Yes… That would probably have to be me.
FB: Why is that?
CA: Because I’m a writer, and you’re a Private Investigator or a Mr Fix-It in the future urban super-embryo called Monstropolis. Which is fictional, I should add.
FB: Not quite. Here’s the problem… You have no idea how real Monstropolis already is. Or myself. You still have no sense of reality when it comes to the fiction that you yourself create. There’s more fiction than fact now, and you have touched upon that occasionally yourself in your writings and lectures. That’s why I’m entitled not only to have more say-so about what’s going to happen in the future Father Black stories but also about what’s going to happen in your own life. I’m going to write you into the stories of that couch potato writer, whether you like it or not.
CA: Is that some kind of threat?
FB: No, darling, that’s a promise.
CA: OK, let’s hear it…
FB: “God, how I hated that man! I used to dream of killing him! Do you know, if ever my mind drifted from the work I was doing, I always pictured myself standing over his corpse with a knife in my hand, laughing my head off.” Good enough for you?
CA: I’m impressed. Imprisoned even. Maybe it’s time you take over? Maybe you should be the main writer from now on? However, I know very well that’s just a stylistic trick. You didn’t actually write that. Mickey Spillane did. It’s from The Lady Says Die! Published in Manhunt Magazine, October 1953.
FB: Well, you should know. I mean, you have appropriated quite a great deal in your own writings over the years. I might even take you on as a case one day. Retracing your writings, line by line, word by word. Fine by me. What would that make you?
CA: Someone making more literary magic than he can handle? Including other writers’ sources to create his own admirable totality? I’d probably become a visible victim of my own circumstances and of my own creative hubris, much like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Disney’s Fantasia.
FB: More like a mix between Groucho Marx by the mirror in Duck Soup or Pierre Menard in Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. We’re running out of page space here, Carl, so listen to this… “The writer settled in snugly in his arm-chair. He realized – finally – that he was nothing but a pathetic middle-aged couch potato, too alone for too long to ever to become socially integrated in any kind of human relationship again. Death would be welcome, whenever. He had a strange suicide planned, desiring to be crushed by massive falling bookshelves filled with thousands of volumes he had read (and some that he had written). That would be the end of it. If that didn’t actually kill him, he would carry a lighter in his hand, and then…”
CA: Not bad. It still sounds like a pretty open ending to me though. How about this: “Father Black gave up all his ambitions to become a meta-magician like his creator and author, and settled in snugly in his arm-chair. He realized – finally – that he was nothing but a fictional character enjoying his peaceful book collecting in between his violent assignments.”
FB: Too late for that now… I dare you.
CA: Too late for that now… I dare you.
(The End?)
Copyright © 2012 Carl Abrahamsson
