Sunday, September 11, 2022

Rodney Thoms and Johnny Hamilton

 


Inspired by the tales told to him

by his grandfather Desmond Thoms  about the disappearance of Desmond’s brother Jimmy, Rodney Thoms had always loved a mystery.  


As a child he liked to imagine he was a famous detective and even used his grandfather’s magnifying glass to look for clues.   As he grew older he read everything he could find about detectives and the work that they did.  


Unsolved mysteries bothered Rodney and he became a private detective opening the first detective agency in Beguile. 

The townsfolk found it a relief to finally have someone to look into some of the more curious and baffling occurrence in the town.


No mystery plagued Rodney more then his grandfather’s brothers disappearance from his gas station on the old highway in the 50s.  Some people who remembered  the famed UFO sightings the summer Jimmy disappeared believed he had simply been abducted by aliens.  Rodney had spoken to eyewitnesses of the event.  Unidentified cylindrical  shaped crafts in the sky had been seen by hundreds of people in Beguile.  


Rodney had also found information on a known gangster who had passed through the town that night but there was no evidence that he had even gone  anywhere near Jimmy’s gas station.  


The disappearance niggled at Rodney and he was slightly perturbed by the continual sightings and accounts of lights and spectral voices at the deserted gas station.  


Rodney did however have one thing that set him apart from other private detectives so he was confident that he would one day crack the case just like the others he was working on in Beguile.   


The citizens of Beguile were thankful for the work Rodney did for the town but behind closed doors they commented and raised their eyebrows at his obsession with a cheap paperback book he had been seen reading since he was a young man.  The book was written by a hack author known as Bryn Dodd, who had lived in the town for a few years and wrote a novel about a detective called Johnny Hamilton.  The book was a failure in the  bookshops and Dolores Paige, the librarian had long ago gotten rid of the town’s copy of the book.  


What Rodney never revealed was that the fictional Johnny Hamilton would leave him messages around the office with clues and tips.  The first message had been on a yellow post-it note left beside Rodney’s dog-eared copy of Hard City Night the book that featured  the gumshoe detective Johnny Hamilton.  The first note was in reference to a missing child and the information on it had been accurate leading to the child being found.  


Since then Rodney had looked forward to the help from the fictional Johnny Hamilton.  It didn’t really matter that he wasn’t real or so Rodney thought.  What Rodney wanted mostly now was a note explaining the boxed human

heart that had just been delivered  to his office.  

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