Your Number's Up

[Volya]

I held the cigarette to my lips and breathed in once more, before tossing the glowing butt into the gutter and heading back to my car. It was a shabby, run-down old Chevy, but it got me where I needed to go. And right now, I needed to get to the hospital.

I was looking at a double homicide. Two broads – hookers most likely - had been shot dead in a cheap motel in the Flats.
Evidently they hadn’t quite got the customer they’d been expecting.

An off-duty cop had heard the gun shots from a neighbouring room and managed to put a bullet in the hitman before he could scarper. Just what a cop was doing in a motel frequented by whores was another matter entirely, something I would look into when this bleak business was over. At the moment the shooter was unconscious and hooked up to a life support machine while the doctors tried to remove the piece of lead embedded in his stomach.
I never did see the point. They bring a guy back from the brink of death only to send him to the electric chair. ‘Cause there was no doubt about it, this guy was gonna get put down. If not by the chair, then by the pissed off pimp who would come looking for revenge.

Once I hit the highway I stamped down on the accelerator. I like to drive and I like to drive fast, and I sure as hell wasn’t gonna get pulled over. The cops in this city know my name. I was at the hospital in a matter of minutes, and I smoothly slid the car to a halt. There were two squad cars in the hospital parking lot, and an anxious looking sergeant walked over to me…

----------Part One---------

Before I write any more I figure it's best to get some feedback, so what do people think? How can I improve?

Volya

[Grit]

Well this wasn't hard to read through, so that's good but there are a few things you need to fix.

We know next to nothing about your narrator, so we can't relate to him/her and don't care about him/her. We don't know the gender, the relationship to the crime, why the narrator is there, what their job is, what they look like. You don't have to deal with all these questions, but we need to at least know why your narrator is there, and gender would be nice. I think it may be a man because he referred to women as broads, although a strange woman could use that word as well.

You've made a mistake I often make in my writing, which is assuming that the reader knows everything about the story you're telling and forgetting to add the details. You say "The cops in this city know my name." which is a break from past tense, btw, but the thing is, we don't even know your character's name. We don't know why the cops in the city know his/her name.

I do like the narrator's voice in this piece, I can see what you're going for, a devil-may-care detective character. This has potential, you can obviously write. Still, we need to know as much as you do about your character and his role in the world you're painting for us.

[Hawkman]

To be honest there's not enough here to make a judgment on. You have clearly established a genre and an idiom, but we don't know who or what the narrator is. Why is he going to the hospital? Is he a cop, a criminal or a reporter? All I can do is ask if you know where this tale is going. If you do, then just write it. I'd quite like to read it.

Live and be well - H

[Volya]

Cheers for the quick response and the feedback, I can see why it's hard to judge when there's not much to go on. I'll probably get some more up in the next few days, I'm writing quite slowly at the moment. :)

[Calidore]

My first question was, if the narrator is on the outs with the cops, where in the world did he get all the information about who did what to whom that apparently just happened? He's very well informed about what seems a pretty complex event.

[Volya]

...'on the outs'?

[Calidore]

...'on the outs'?

Oh, not a cross-Atlantic idiom then? It means on unfriendly terms.

http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/on+the+outs

[Volya]

Ah ok, well I won't say anything because as a story it should be able to do that without having to directly address the reader, but hopefully things will be clearer as the story progresses. :)

[hillwalker]

You seem to have got the voice right if you're aiming to write in the style of American pulp fiction. It's the kind of story where the narrator, a hard-nosed PI presumably, addresses the reader quite intimately and assumes they know who he is and what he does for a living. . . so I don't think it matters just yet that we don't know his name or what he looks like or even his gender. There's a lot implied from the way it's written - and you can feed in the detail as the plot unravels.

One thing jarred though - the word 'scarper'. I'm not sure it's contextually correct. It sounds more East End than Big Apple or LA.

As for the change in tense : 'The cops in this city know my name.' I don't see a problem grammatically. The story is being reported as if it happened some time ago - the cops knew your name then - but they still know it now. So you're stating a given fact that still applies today - in which case it's perfecly acceptable.

But I agree with the others that it's difficult to give a meaningful crit without seeing where you take it next.

H

[Calidore]

Hillwalker's comment about tense reminded me of something: He's right about "know my name", and that would also apply to "I liked to drive and I liked to drive fast." Unless he doesn't anymore, that should also be present tense. And driving fast doesn't make him less likely to be pulled over, but more. Generally, if people don't want the attention of the police, they behave themselves. That jarred a bit.

And Hill's also right that "scarpered" is out of place in American-style pulp fiction.

Finally, "get killed" is a bit off when talking about the electric chair. Since that or the pimp's revenge would both be executions, may I suggest "be put down" instead?

[Volya]

Thanks for the feedback, I will take action upon it.

[Lokasenna]

I like it, brief though it is - very noir-ish.

I think Hill and Calidore are on the mark about tenses, but that is a minor thing.

I wonder whether the piece is just verging ever so slightly on parody? Or perhaps it is meant to? It seems to me to be toeing the line between pastiche and caricature, and I can't quite decide which side it comes down on. Perhaps too much of a hint of the Tracer Bullet style of monologue: http://tracerbullett.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/tracer_lamp.jpg

[AuntShecky]

Like Lokasenna, I thought I was reading a parody as well. If this is a straight-up whodunit, if I were you, I would try to avoid the conventions of the genre as much as I could.

The older I get-- meaning the more I have read--the more cliché-intolerant I become. Hence, the misgivings about déjà vu, the sense of having read hundreds of things like this before.