Thursday, May 21, 2009

Thursday, May 21, 2009

The following is a commentary from Edson Stanley, leading authority on detectives of the 1940s and 1950s and Professor of Letters at the University of South Dubuque at Dubuque. Mr. Stanley has been given charge of the project to discover the authenticity of the Stone notebooks.


Good evening.


When the alleged hand-written notebooks of Rocky Stone were discovered in San Francisco last year, one of the first questions asked by experts was 'Why should we care?' The only indication of the existence of Rocky Stone, private investigator, was a character in a series of 24 stories in True Real Detective Magazine, beginning in July 1949, all written by a previously (and currently) unknown author by the name of Adam Santeno. Obviously, we first believed the notebooks to be the notes of Mr. Santeno, a back story if you will, for the articles appearing in print. Both were written in the first person from the perspective of Rocky Stone, both cover similar material, and both have similar descriptions of the characters; for instance, Stone describes his secretary Wanda in both versions with the same words: “...she’s a good kid and minds her own business and minds it well.”

However, key differences exist. Consider the previous blog entry, printed below from the Stone notebooks dated April 17, 1949, a seemingly mundane event in which a small child (who is later identified as Mary Jane Stubble, daughter of Hiram Stubble of the Heywood and Stubble Theatrical Agency up the hall) needs help to find the lavatory. A similar incident occurs in the first Santeno story, entitled “She Killed Me for Murder's Sake”:


I ducked into my office around ten o'clock and my secretary, Wanda Wallace, was seated her desk waiting for me. Her fiery red hair taunted the gray of my office walls with its brilliance as she stood and handed me the day's paperwork. “There's someone to see you, Rocky,” she said.
“Tall, blonde, and gorgeous?” I asked, hopefully.
“Not exactly, but you won't be disappointed.”
The door to my inner office opened easily and I was faced with a tasty blonde in a pink dress, the color of spring flowers. She stood quietly looked at me with pleading eyes and I could tell right away that she needed help and needed a lot of it, and I was the man to give it to her. I knew she was missing something, even though she didn't breathe a word: a necklace, a man, a way out of this crazy world...


This continues on for some time, but eventually it is discovered that she has, in fact, lost her boyfriend, a shady character by the name of Byron Ilk, and finally, that she is in need of a restroom.


However, continued study of the notebooks led to a startling discovery. At the end of the first notebook, in an entry dated June 15th, the journal's author wrote:


One of the cops said he read about me in True Real Detective Magazine. I asked him what he meant by that and he handed me a slab of pulp that turned my blood to stone. The second lead was a story called “Murder Me Softly, Murder Me Slowly” by some hack named Adam Santeno. And wouldn't you know it was all about the Sherman-Clayton murders last year. It was like the little runt was inside my head...


What this means we are not exactly sure, but it seems evident that Santeno and Stone are not the same person. Perhaps further study of the notebooks will reveal the true relationship between these two.


Good evening.

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