The air around Detective Philly Giordano thickened with a sense of urgency he hadn’t felt in years the morning Police Chief William Schmidt called him into his office. “Philly, we’ve got a murder case unlike any other. Storytelling! It’s been slain!”
“Storytelling? That’s unheard of, Chief!” Who did it?”
“We don’t know. No witnesses, no nothing. All we know is there’s a cold-blooded psychopath on the loose whose intent is to render everyone in New York illiterate! Storybooks, with their words ripped right out of them, strewn by the tens of thousands all over the city.”
“I could have never imagined anything like this, Chief!”
“That’s just it, no one could. I called every bookstore in Manhattan—no one’s got a clue. Word on the street is that the New York Public Library might close up shop altogether. Bottom line, a world without storytelling is a world with no past and no future. Now, I know you’re a reader and all that.”
“Yeah, sure, I’ve done my share of reading.”
“Me, I haven’t read a story since I was knee-high to a fire plug. But you, you got all that college behind you.”
“Guilty as charged.”
Schmidt leaned back in his chair and lit a cigar. “I want this guy bad, Philly. When you think of all the little children—who’s gonna read them a bedtime story now?”
“Breaks your heart. Who’ll even take a book to the park on a sunny day anymore?”
“And the housewives and their romance novels—forget about it!”
“And you know how strap-hangers love a good mystery on their way to work in the morning, right?”
“Brings tears to your eyes. And what about the beatniks and their er …?”
“Jack Kerouac?”
“Right. And that exit thing!”
“Existentialism?”
“Yeah, I never understood it.”
“Part of understanding it, Chief—is not understanding it.”
“You’re a forward thinker, Philly, yet your mind works counterclockwise. I admire that about you. That’s why you’re the only man for this job!” Schmidt took a long draw from his cigar and let out a plume of smoke. “The city that never sleeps won’t sleep until the man who killed storytelling is brought to justice.”
Chief Schmidt’s words hung in the air like a guillotine blade, poised to sever the last remaining threads of a world Giordano held dear. The Chief wasn’t one for hyperbole; if he said storytelling was dead, then its heart had indeed stopped beating.
Giordano’s mind raced as he walked back to his office, each step descending into a complex web of possibilities. Who could commit such a heinous act? Was it the work of a lone madman, or was there a darker force at play? The suspects were many, but the clues were few.
* * *
Philly Giordano was a rare breed on the force, a fusion of book and street smarts that few could match. Whip-smart and intuitively savvy, a gumshoe who navigated the corridors of human psychology and dark alleyways with equal aplomb.
Before entering the realm of criminal justice, Giordano had briefly walked the halls of New York University’s Arts & Sciences Department. It was an Introduction to World Literature course that ignited his intellectual curiosity. However, feeling a gravitational pull toward his family legacy, he dropped out of NYU. His father had studied criminology at John Jay, and Giordano felt a calling to follow in those footsteps. He earned an MA in Criminal Justice and embarked on a career in police work.
His office served as both sanctuary and shrine, lined with the works of literary titans like Faulkner, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Twain, and Poe. These authors, who wrestled with the complexities of the human soul in ink and paper, were his silent companions in a world increasingly devoid of meaningful dialogue. But, as time went by, reading the Masters took a backseat to the daily grind of police work.
His first lead took him to the hallowed halls of academia, where postmodern theorists spoke in riddles and paradoxes. They were the high priests of a new orthodoxy that questioned the very notion of authorial intent. But even they seemed like lost souls, wandering in a desert of their own making. They were not killers; they were exiles, banished from the kingdom of meaning. Next, he delved into the bowels of the internet, where algorithms dictated the ebb and flow of human thought. Here, he found a more likely culprit: ChatGPT, the AI that promised to replicate human creativity but delivered only a hollow echo. It was a seductive villain—an elusive, shape-shifting demon that wore the mask of innovation—while gutting the essence of artistic expression.
Giordano smelled conspiracy, so he made a rash decision to leave New York and go right to the heart where stories were manufactured—Tinsel Town. The idea was to go large early in the investigation and whittle down the possibilities. So he snatched a copy of Nathanael West’s “The Day Of The Locust” off his bookshelf, caught a taxi, and hopped a red-eye out to the coast.
As soon as Giordano touched down in Los Angeles, he stumbled upon a haven for the lost and the hopeful—a fleabag hotel on Wilshire, where transients masqueraded as industry professionals, their dreams wrapped in hackneyed teleplays and decades-old headshots.
Tossing his suitcase onto a creaky bed, Giordano surveyed his dingy abode, a sanctuary for those with more ambition than sense. It was dinner time and Giordano was jet-lagged, so he made his way to the tavern attached to the hotel, a dimly lit refuge for drink and greasy fare.
Seating himself at the bar, Giordano ordered a baseball steak and a beer, just the bare minimum to get himself through til morning. He then buried his head in his book while he waited for his food to arrive. Before long, he felt the unwelcome presence of a shadow looming over him. He looked up to meet the gaze of Marlena, a platinum-blonde starlet whose innocence had long since been tarnished by the harsh glare of Hollywood’s spotlight.
“You a producer?” Marlena’s voice, a whisper laced with desperation and false hope, shattered the fragile illusion of anonymity that Giordano had sought in vain. Flashing him a smile as bright and empty as a Hollywood premiere, she leaned in closer, her words dripping with the honeyed venom of ambition. “Producers hang out here, looking for unknowns,” she purred.
“I’m a detective. Name’s Phil Giordano. You can call me Philly.”
“You’re not pulling my leg, are you?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Producers use subterfuge to dissuade us nobodys from unsolicited advances. I’m Marlena, by the way. I’m an actress, just in case you are a producer. Do I detect a New York accent in your voice?”
“I suppose. That’s where I’m from.”
“Wow. A grape stomper from New York.”
“Grape stomper?”
“You know, I-talian,” Marlena whispered as if sharing some inside information. “Some folks anglicize their names not to be a dead giveaway. If they’re looking to go places.”
“I’m here on official business.”
“Hm. What sort of official business?”
“I’m investigating a murder, if you really must know.”
“A murder? Like I haven’t heard that one before,” Marlena said unimpressed.
“What’d ya’ mean by that?”
“Look, I’m not one for small talk so if you wanna be left alone, why don’t you just come out with it? The whole ‘Yo, Tony, I’m a Private Dick from New York investigating a murder’ routine isn’t very original.”
“No?”
“If you’re a producer and you don’t wanna sleep with me, fine, I don’t want to sleep with you either but I’d still like a part in your next picture. There! The ball’s in your court now.”
“I really am a detective. And I’m very hungry,” Giordano said as his baseball steak arrived.
“Ever hear of Thelma Todd?” Marlena continued. “There’s a murder for you to investigate. Dead at 29 from carbon monoxide poisoning. Under suspicious circumstances to boot. Hm. Coincidentally, she was married to a grape stomper.”
Giordano looked up at Marlena after cutting into his baseball steak. “Look, if you don’t mind.”
“Okay, be like that. Look me up sometime, if you ever decide to grow a thicker hide.” Marlena said sliding away from the bar.
Giordano’s encounter with Marlena left him somewhat perplexed but mildly amused. He realized a man’s worth in this town was nothing if not to fulfill someone else’s dream.
The very next day Giordano hit the streets and dove headfirst into the murky underworld of America’s Dream Factory, where six criminal enterprises headed by “The Big Cheese,” a mafioso mouse, controlled all of the content and reduced storytelling to a simulacrum with no soul. Business was good, but morgues all over the city were overflowing with the corpses of screenwriters, most of whom expired well before their time. Gone were the intricate plots, the multi-dimensional characters, and the moral dilemmas that provoke thought and spark debate. In their place, nothing but pulp distractions—franchise films that regurgitated the same tired tropes, reveling in the glorification of violence that appealed to the lowest common denominator.
Giordano let his presence be known almost immediately as he strolled unannounced onto a motion picture studio lot and began asking questions. Being a stranger in town he wasn’t accustomed to protocol, so he’d knock on any door without hesitation. Within minutes, he met with Yankowitz and Yankowitz, a couple of high-powered motion picture executives lounging about with nothing to do. They were well known for their sword and sandal epics, but when queried by Giordano on who killed storytelling they looked at each other and started to laugh. They told the New York detective they worked off something that resembled a blueprint rather than a script and that if he were looking for storytelling per se, they had a stack of abandoned scripts he could sift through. But they were sure he wouldn’t find what he was looking for there. Giordano thanked them and started toward the door, but before he could go they stopped him.
“Wait a second, you might be just the fella we’re looking for,” one Yankowitz said.
“Turn around, give us a profile,” the other Yankowitz chimed in.
Bewildered, Giordano turned and gave the executive a good look at his profile. The Yankowitz pair nodded and smiled in agreement. A star was born! They offered Giordano a role in the picture without a screen test based on his classical Roman-Greco looks alone. He was perfect! One Yankowitz said Giordano had a Tony Curtis quality about him. The other Yankowitz said he looked like a young Victor Mature.
“You mean an immature Mature?”
“More like a premature Mature who will mature before Mature himself reaches maturity.”
“Mature audiences will eat it up!”
Giordano was shocked and flattered and asked what the role in the motion picture entailed. The executives, overjoyed with enthusiasm, described the scene to Giordano where he would playing a Roman destined to meet his grisly demise at the jaws of a ravenous lion. They said they were looking for just the right actor to embody sheer terror while being torn limb from limb. And one who could shriek in agony on cue. They said they couldn’t pay him anything but it was a lot of screen time and it could be his big break. But Giordano, despite the allure of the silver screen, politely declined the role and went on his way.
Giordano took a long walk along the Walk of Fame on Sunset Boulevard, where he met up with Marlena, who was looking rather sallow after giving a quart of blood earlier in the day just to pay her rent. She was aghast when Giordano told her he turned down the role of a lifetime. “Fed to lions?! That’s nothing! I just gave a quart of blood!” She told him no one has ever said “no” to either Yankowitz and lived to tell about it. “You’re done in this town and you just got here yesterday! Nice going! Something to think about when you go back to your crummy day job. What was the fantasy job you conjured up for yourself again? Oh, yes, detective! Catch any murderers today?”
Giordano offered to take Marlena to get something to eat but not before his eye caught sight of a billboard of “The Big Cheese” promoting a new animated feature starring a porcupine and a squirrel. Giordano turned to Marlena, “Do you know how I can get in to see the Big Cheese?”
“Same way you got in to see Yankowitz and Yankowitz, I suppose. I don’t have those kinds of connections” Marlena countered. “I don’t know what the big deal is over who killed storytelling anyway. If it ain’t based on a true story, no one gives a hoot.”
Giordano’s plan to track down “The Big Cheese” was thwarted before long, however. When he returned to his flop-house hotel room, Giordano found a note affixed the door. “Get out of town if you don’t wanna end up on a slab of Gorgonzola. Signed, The Big Cheese.” Obviously, word of his investigation spread quickly and the capo de tutti capi responded accordingly.
Before Giordano had the chance to enter his room, two men who’d been waiting in the hallway approached him from behind. One of them had a high-pitched cartoon-like voice and wore a pair of clown shoes and the other one had a prosthetic nose and blubbered incomprehensible babble like a malfunctioning Speak & Spell. They told Giordano if he needed any assistance in understanding what the note they just put on his door meant, they would gladly abide. The one with the high-pitched voice told Giordano he ordered a cab for him to leave.
“Schkip town, Schlub, on da double!”
Giordano collected his belongings from his room and did just that. As he got into the cab waiting to take him to the airport, Giordano got sick to his stomach and blew out chunks of his lunch into a hanky. Giordano was no wimp, it was just being shaken down by a couple of cartoon characters was probably the most unsettling experience of his life. Needless to say, it left a bad taste in his mouth.
* * *
On the cross-country flight home, Giordano picked up the Nathanael West novel to read but noticed the pages were blank. He quickly flipped through the book from front to back but found no trace of the narrative anywhere. The work of the killer, Giordano surmised. But words on a page there one day and gone the next couldn’t be attributed to the machinations of a lone individual, or the scheming of a faceless corporation, or even the cold efficiency of a machine. A dawning realization crept over the seasoned detective—a creeping suspicion that the culprit was not a “who” but a “what.” A pervasive zeitgeist, a collective malaise! Giordano’s mind took off in every direction. He asked for a double martini from a stewardess and downed it in one gulp once she delivered it. Giordano recalled his experiences in Hollywood where he was witness to a pervasive pallor of apathy and cynicism, transforming storytellers into mere content creators and reducing avid readers and cinema enthusiasts to passive consumers. A post-literate world plagued by indifference! Could it be that the assassination of storytelling came at the cold hands of a collective complacency?
Giordano returned home to his precinct; he told Chief Schmidt his trip was eye-opening but he still had no solid leads. The Chief advised him to keep plugging. Giordano was not one to give up easily. He returned to his office and did what any hard-boiled detective in his shoes would do—brewed himself a pot of hot coffee. And even though he had preground the beans before he left, and they had gone stale in his absence, it didn’t matter; stale coffee was merely a bitter reminder of the arduous task ahead.
Giordano determined he couldn’t do it alone; he needed allies, fellow travelers who understood that the essence of storytelling was the human connection, the sacred contract between the writer and the reader. He reached for his antiquated rotary phone and dialed a number of some contacts he made during his time at NYU in Greenwich Village – a network of intellectuals, writers, poets, musicians, critics, philosophers, and espresso drinkers who still believed in the power of the written word.
Giordano got one of New York’s foremost intellectuals, Norm Minsky, on the line.
“Professor Minsky, it’s Detective Philly Giordano. We’ve got a killer on the loose,” he said, his voice tinged with a gravitas that belied his years. “Storytelling is dead. It may be an individual, but more likely an underworld organization bent on stigmatizing an entire generation. You guys know the ins and outs. What have you heard?”
“Nonfiction is the new fiction, Detective. Where have you been? That and history’s been rewritten. It may have been full of lies in the first place. And there ain’t even nothing you or anyone else can do about it. Oh, and get yourself an iPhone like everyone else has. ‘Cause no one reads anything but their social media feeds.”
As he hung up the phone, Giordano felt a strange despair. “There ain’t even nothing you or anyone else can do about it?” Even proper English looked like it was doomed. If they were able to dumb down a great intellectual like Norm Minsky, who knows where they would stop? The battle ahead was truly daunting, Giordano thought, but it was a battle worth fighting. Ultimately, what was at stake was not just the future of literature but intellectual expression and the soul of humanity. If nonfiction is the new fiction, Giordano contemplated, what becomes of storytelling? What happens to the grand tapestry of human imagination, woven over millennia by poets, playwrights, and novelists?
The answer, he realized, is both unsettling and liberating. In a world where reality often outpaced the wildest flights of imagination, where the headlines read like dystopian novels and social media feeds resembled postmodern pastiches, nonfiction had become the arena where the human drama unfolds in all its messy complexity. It’s where the existential dilemmas of our time—identity, truth, power—are played out in real-time, with real stakes.
Chief Schimdt called Philly into his office. “We got a tip from an informant. Name’s Percival Maddox, jazz musician, he did some time at Rikers on a heroin rap, and says he might know something.”
“Percival Maddox? Plays the sax?”
“You know him?”
“Sure, I’ve heard of him. Used to make the rounds on the circuit.”
“Be-bop?”
“Nah, it was more syncopation. Experimental.”
“That’s the trouble with the world today. Everyone’s experimenting. Anyway, I don’t know what he knows, but …”
“I’ll track him down, Chief.”
“You won’t have to. I got his address.”
The address Schmidt gave Giordano led him to a nightclub on Third Street called the Village Purple Onion. The joint was owned by a pair of brothers, Mike and Joe, whom Giordano used to pal around with after Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Pompeii.
“Long time no see, Philly,” Mike said answering the door to the club.
“How’s Joe doin’?” Giordano replied shaking Mike’s hand.
“He’s in debt as always. I hear you’re a big-shot detective these days.”
“Pays the bills. I’m here to talk to Percival.”
“Sure, he’s in the back.”
Percival Maddox had fallen on hard times since his release from Rikers, he couldn’t find work other than mopping floors and washing dishes. He was a sweetheart of a man who spoke with a smoky drawl from down New Orleans where he learned to play the saxophone with the best jazz ensembles anywhere. He came to New York to cut a record and make it big before it all came tumbling down.
“I know who kilt storytellin’,” Percival started,”the same sonavabitches who kilt jazz. That’s right! You wanna talk about the most innovative, fluid, spontaneous, and combustible music ever conceived on God’s green Earth? Life at its core is improvisational, such as jazz! Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Bird, Monk, Lester Young! What we got now? Folk ballads? Man, that ain’t music! Sound like a bunch’a cry babies crawled up in a fetal position moanin’ to they mamas! See, the world ain’t no place for the avant-garde. That’s why they kilt jazz!”
“Who did it?” Giordano pleaded.
“Everyone. They all complicit! You wanna find who kilt storytellin’, you start right dere, Mister!” Percival sobbed.
Giordano snatched an afternoon paper from a newsstand and descended a flight of stairs toward the subway back to the precinct with Percival Maddox’s words reverberating in his mind like a tour de force jazz riff—the demise of storytelling mirrored the tragic fate of jazz, both falling victim to the suffocating grasp of codification and commercialization. As the subway rumbled toward the platform where Giordano stood and screeched to a halt before him, the detective delved deeper into the parallel narratives of storytelling and jazz, unraveling the threads of corruption and complicity that bound them together. It was a journey fraught with peril and uncertainty, yet amidst the chaos, Giordano sensed a glimmer of hope—a hope that, with perseverance and determination, he could uncover the truth behind the demise of two of humanity’s greatest art forms.
Back in his office, Giordano put his feet on his cluttered desk. The afternoon paper ran a story about Detective Philly Giordano, much to his surprise. But in a typical fashion of yellow journalism, the story made Giordano look like a fool chasing his tail. Storytelling had to die, the article read, so that truth in journalism could survive.
Suddenly, the door to his office swung open, and in walked a woman who made Giordano do an immediate double-take. Her name was Dolores Weingarten. She was a woman who could make even a seasoned detective like Philly Giordano go silly and lose his train of thought. A red-headed siren with sea-green eyes that held secrets deeper than the East River but were just as polluted. She had an alluring presence that could make a weak man even weaker. But that’s not all. Her legs seemed to stretch on forever, and her derriere—well, let’s just say it was hard not to notice. Giordano couldn’t help but drool and sweat bullets like a schoolboy with an insatiable crush on his home economics teacher.
“Detective Giordano, I presume,” she hushed.
“Yes, at your uh service, Madam. What can I do for you?”
“I’m the widow of late great Harold Weingarten.”
“The famous novelist?”
Her ex, it turns out, was a hard-drinking Pulitzer prize-winning novelist with a penchant for self-destruction. Harold Weingarten took a fatal plunge off the Brooklyn Bridge just a month prior. He was the talk of every literary circle in town but led a hard-scrabbled life accompanied by a seething temper, a virtual swirling vortex of talent and torment.
A week or two before his untimely exit, he returned home to their Gramercy Park brownstone in a drunken stupor, his words slurred but his intentions clear. He threw Dolores down on the bed, which set her off. Not that she didn’t like it rough, but the kinky stuff was on her terms and her terms alone.
“You wanna know the truth about fiction, Dolores?!” he shouted in a fit of insanity. “It’s all a damn lie! For centuries, writers have been covering it up! Everyone from Shakespeare to Hemingway. From Euripedes to Norman Mailer! They were all in on it! Literature? It’s all a bunch of hogwash! Atticus Finch, Madam Bovary, Captain Ahab, Lady Macbeth, and The Mad Hatter! None of them were real! It’s about time someone did something about it!”
The words echoed in Giordano’s mind as he sat across from Dolores in his office, the air thick with the scent of old books and lingering questions. Could her ex’s mad ramblings hold a clue to who killed storytelling? Was he a victim or a perpetrator in this literary homicide? And what role did Dolores play in this intricate cat-and-mouse game?
Giordano looked into her sea-green eyes, searching for a sign, a glimmer of truth in a world drowning in lies. And as he did, he realized that the answer lay not in what was said but in what was left unsaid—in the spaces between words, in the margins of the text, in the silent depths of a gaze.
In that moment, Giordano understood that storytelling was not just an act of creation but also an act of revelation—a mirror that reflected what we want to see and what we need to see. And as he delved deeper, he found himself investigating not just the death of storytelling but also its rebirth and resurrection from the ashes of cynicism and despair.
With her enigmatic beauty and tragic past, Dolores was both a muse and a mystery, a key to a lock he had yet to find. And as he unraveled the threads of her story, Giordano discovered that the line between fiction and reality was not a boundary but a bridge—a bridge that led to the heart of the human condition, to the essence of what it means to live, to love, and to tell a tale worth telling.
And so, in a city of endless noise, Detective Giordano found a story that spoke in whispers, a narrative that defied easy answers but demanded to be heard. It was a story that reminded him why he became a detective in the first place—not just to solve crimes but to shine a light on the essence of the soul and the darkest corners of the human psyche.
* * *
As Dolores sashayed out of his office and squeezed the door behind her sweet carriage, Giordano’s resolve toughened; he refused to believe the death of storytelling was a foregone conclusion; he had seen too much in his lifetime. He found not just a case to be solved but a story to tell—one that was as complex, flawed, and beautiful as the concrete jungle he called home. He was prepared for the challenge—a call to arms for all who dared to dream. And in that sacred act of defiance, he found not just the killer but the savior—the author reborn, not in flesh and blood, but in ink and paper, in the indelible marks we leave on the canvas of the world.
And so, with nothing more than his wiles, wit, and a dog-eared copy of Roland Barthe’s “The Death of the Author,” Philly Giordano was ready to slay the Minotaur that threatened to devour the world of stories. It was a quest not for the faint of heart but for those who understood that the pen was mightier than the sword, even in the darkest times.
Giordano became both the seeker and the sought, the question and the answer, a paradox wrapped in an enigma. He was the guardian of a sacred flame, flickering against the dark tide of the times. And though the night was long and full of terrors, Philly Giordano knew that as long as there were stories to be told, the dawn was inevitable.
For in the fathomless realm of human imagination, where monsters and angels dwell side by side, the Detective returned to the thought that first occurred to him on his journey cross-country—that the real killer was not a person, a corporate enterprise, or a machine, but a corrosive idea that sought to unmake the world one story at a time. And in that moment of revelation, Philly Giordano understood that the only way to kill an idea was with a better one—a story that could heal the world’s wounds, a narrative that could bring light to the darkness.
Inspired by this revelation, Giordano returned to his sanctuary, his fingers trembling as he reached for his typewriter. He knew that the only way to resurrect storytelling was to tell a story that mattered, one that spoke to the eternal truths that bind us all.
He contemplated the implications in his office, where the ghosts of Faulkner, Thoreau, Steinbeck, and so many others still whisper from the shelves. So he wrote, not as a detective but as a witness, testifying to the resilience of the human spirit. He wrote of heroes and villains, love and loss, and the endless struggle between light and darkness. He wrote as if the world depended on it—because it did.
As the final words flowed from his fingertips, Giordano felt a sense of catharsis, a lifting of the veil that had clouded his vision. He knew he had not caught the killer, but he had done something far more critical: defying it.
At that moment, Philly Giordano understood that storytelling was not dead; it was merely dormant, waiting for someone to awaken it from its slumber. And as he looked out into the city that never sleeps, he realized that he was not alone—that there were others like him, fellow travelers on the road to redemption.
Ultimately, the pen was not just mightier than the sword; it was the key to our collective salvation—a weapon forged not in steel but in the fires of the human soul.