Newspaper Columns and the Epistolary in Detective Grigoris

Note: this article was originally published on 15 December 2024 on my Substack newsletter, The Traveller’s Literary Supplicant.

By Christopher Deliso

The series on the making of my detective novel continues today with a piece that might be useful for other writers, as it discusses methods that are applied often by novelists—that is, the insertion of other forms of writing to complement the greater narrative. In today’s case, these are the newspaper column and letter fragments. Yet how can they benefit a detective novel?

Writers include these and other media artifacts for myriad reasons. For me, it was not only to accentuate the singularities of certain characters, and to ‘speak for them,’ providing alternative dialogue options during the long sections in which they were not part of the ‘action’ of the plot; this narrative method was also used to reinforce the historicity of the setting (1999-2002), a much more paper-bound time than now, one in which people lived in the innocent joy of their carbon-based life-forms, never feeling the worse for the situation.

The physicality of text—the text of the novel—is also reinforced by careful insertions of alien bodies, as it were, interwoven into the main narrative. This tends to function again in a complementary manner to the ‘legitimate’ text of the plain narrative, and with its other external counterpart being the musical allusions—one of which we discussed last time.

Hopefully this discussion will be of use to writers and readers alike. Stick around ‘til the end for another omitted anti-excerpt from the Detective Grigoris novel.

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