The story of
Johhny Morte has become more interesting to me as I've worked on it this time round. Initially, it was a one-off homage to Death Note, except that Johnny was a devious private eye who faked being psychic, and Death wasn't so much a god, as a grumpy tradesman. Then, as I started to look at elongating the narrative and watched some old Mister Jordan movies, and one awful TVM with much the same theme as Death Note, the idea of a grumpy Death figure, one of many stationed on the surface of the Earth and just doing their job, started to appeal. It then became a sort of cross between Death Note, Raymond Brigg's grumpy Father Christmas, and an ancient tale of Pluto tricking a human into taking his place in Hades. Even at that though, it was an idea that would pretty quickly run its course. But then I got to thinking, there's no such thing as a free lunch; you just couldn't really give a human that sort of experience and not wonder how it had changed them, which is where the Death Note one-off homage ends, and the story of Johnny Morte, reluctant PI to the damned, actually begins.
So, Johnny Mortenson isn't a particularly nice guy; he gambles, badly, and has been gathering a reputation as a psychic private investigator. That is to say, he is a psychic who happens to be a private investigator, not a private investigator who investigates psychic phenomenon. Except he isn't, psychic that is; he is a shyster, a huckster, a conman, who pays a variety of dodgy individuals and a network of stoolies to provide him with information that he uses to "psychically" solve cases, in the full glare of the media. Until that is, in the course of a night and a day, his life changes dramatically.
Copyright, Rod McKie, 2009, 2010.
