Well, I finally tried my hand at writing a novel or more accurately a novella, but ran into a little difficulty at release time—it was considerably worse for our nation but certainly less than ideal for me too. Timing, as they say, is everything.
My story is an adaptation of a public domain Agatha Christie novel The Murder On The Links about the death of a shady adulterous businessman on a golf course into which I placed fictionalized versions of current public figures and set it in the recent past just before a certain someone rose to power. I balanced all of my corrupt characters with a single beacon of morality and clarity, settling on RBG as my stand in for Hercule Poirot. Problem was, the judicial icon passed away less than one week after I began rolling out my self-published e-book to friends and family.
I named my master detective character SBG, Sleuth Bader Ginsburg, and paired her with Jules, a fictionalized version of Rudy Giuliani, as they investigated the murder of the aforementioned shady businessman, hired by the dead man himself just before his untimely demise. All good fun until a comedic mystery involving an equal rights hero suddenly felt wildly inappropriate, further complicated by the hypocritical Republican rush to replace the great justice with her bible-thumping antithesis. Which the maskless right celebrated with a superspreading White House event that certainly qualifies as ironically humorous as long as our democracy survives the election. Mark Twain defined humor as tragedy plus time so we can look forward to an unprecedented amount of humor coming our way thanks to the nightmare that is/was 2020.
I have since moved on to other writing projects that will have considerably less to do with any current public figures but hope that someday my project can be read as a tribute to RBG’s lifelong battle for equality and her unlikely ascension to pop culture icon status.
RIP Notorious RBG who will live forever in the history books and one oddball work of satire, for which I can only say, I meant well.
Here is my book cover and opening sequence for the morbidly curious:
