Notes on: The One With the Match

I wrote The One Who Holds the Match after visiting the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis.  I intended to write a story about Indianapolis and I had fun working on a particular modern caper but it had nothing really in common with the inspiration I received from that visit to KVML. The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library places an emphasis on first amendment advocacy and addressing the scourge of book banning that has emerged with a fervor recently in the United States to coincide with political unrest and political opportunism. I believed that a story about preventing ideas in books from being distributed to be a story worth telling. Coincidentally, it became interesting to me that the story might have followed a different pattern, one that hews closer to the classic Holmes short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about a blackmailer, Charles Augustus Milverton. But the story I wanted to tell flips expectations about whom the real villain is. Metaphorically or otherwise, the villain is the one holding the match.

The other interesting dynamic in this story is that this is one of the adventures where the hero fails.  He is given a task by his client, and he succeeds on behalf of his client because he locates the whereabouts of Montville hidden treasures and there is a promised comeuppance to the villain in the story and yet, it is still, not a victory.  As the library burns, we recognize it is a tragedy. This is a story with resolution, but it does not have a happy ending. Our heroes make mistakes and try to learn from them. In the canon of the Barnaby Druthers mythos, the One Who Holds the Match is an important chapter.

One quick note as stated in multiple locations on this website: I’m not a member of the WGA (which is currently on strike as of this writing). The scripts I write are for non-commercial community radio where there is no monetary flow to anyone and no producer or studio makes money from this creation or have any possible way to profit from the writing. If that situation ever changed, I would proudly become a WGA member and would be on the picket line instead of writing.