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The Character of the Fixxer

Character is everything.

When I started writing “Blood is Pretty” my goal was not so much to tell a story as to create a character. The story, I assumed, would flow from the character once I got him into an interesting enough situation. And I wanted, from the beginning, to create a larger than life character. I am melodramatic by nature, the outsize appeals to me. The mundane does not.

So I knew I did not want to create another hard-boiled, street wise private eye living from commission to commission, too moral for his own good. Nor an overworked cop too cynical for his own good. Nor a CIA civil servant hindered by Federal bureaucracy. Nor a twice divorced forensic pathologist trying to decide if he/she is gay or not. I didn’t want to create a character who had day to day nagging problems; a character with bills to pay and a car to get fixed and a family to love, hate or be misunderstood by. All this may be real, gritty, contemporary, but all this was not for me. I did not want to create a character the reader could relate to. I wanted to create a character the reader could look up to. I wanted to create a Hero.

So who’s to say the mundane can’t be heroes? Okay, I wanted to create a Romantic Hero. Not Romance Hero, mind you, of long blond tress and bare chest, a creature of creepy women’s paperback dreams. But Romantic in the sense of the Byronic, I suppose, mixed with the American Cowboy mixed with an Anglo-Saxon aristocratic sense of superiority, even if that sense is self-anointed as opposed to being anointed by birth or society. And yet, it’s not quite as serious as this sounds. I see too much the comic in life for that. My Romantic Hero definitely comes from a Popular Cultural lineage rather than a -- what the hell’s the opposite? Unpopular culture? -- rather than “serious” culture, let’s say (Not that pollen from such “serious” culture hasn’t drifted my way). The Romantic here may be something as contemplative as the Fixxer’s feeling that he is a man out of time, and the mystery of his past, and his attitude towards killing (especially killing by his hand -- again, his past comes into play), an attitude sometimes expressed with humor, sometimes with horror. All of this, like a good Byronic Hero, allows him to brood -- even if ever so lightly -- now and then. But it is also the romance of the enviable. The Fixxer is, after all, his own, self-financed boss. The Fixxer answers to no one. The Fixxer does exactly as he pleases. The Fixxer never hesitates to express his own opinion, unvarnished. The Fixxer has ultimate freedom. And freedom is the most Romantic concept in the world. Especially considering that the Fixxer does not take that freedom lightly. To be a free man is his main purpose in action. I am not talking about political freedom, although that’s a part of it, but the more essential freedom to be yourself and to express that self and to do as yourself, from which the concept of political freedom most likely sprang. Remember, wage slaves can live in a democracy. People trapped in a corporate culture can live in a democracy. People delineated along racial, sexual, economic, and ethnic lines by society rather than by themselves (who know the inner truth) can live in a democracy.

There is also the romance that the Fixxer is almost always in knowledgeable control of the situation. Even when he becomes violent in order to intimidate, you get the feeling that it is but a well calculated act. But I also hope that the reader will wonder just how much of that act may be based on something so basic to his nature that one would not be surprised to see the Fixxer lose control of the act and give in to raw violent passion.

And yet, the Fixxer is basically a fun guy. Well, that’s not quite right. Fun to be around? Yes, but that’s not fully it. Fun to be? Yes. And that’s the key. As I’ve said, I don’t want the reader to relate to the Fixxer, I don’t want the reader to say, “He could be me.” I want the reader to declare, “Damn! I wish I was him!”