Surfing Detective 04 - Hanging Ten in Paris

Preface

    The idea behind
Hanging Ten in Paris
geminated when I was in that city during the autumn of 2009, after the recent passing of my mother. Though the occasion for this sojourn was to celebrate in grand style the birthday of a dear friend, my mood was understandably somber and I could not shake the dark omnipresence of death. In this atmosphere of sadness and gloom, one evening in a restaurant in the Latin Quarter near the Pantheon I observed a table of a dozen diners—all, except one, American students. The one exception was also an American, a man of at least twice their age. The man could only have been their professor, and their dining together a celebratory event during a study abroad term in Paris.
    I knew this scene well because the year before I had taken such a group to study in London. My students all had come from University of Hawai‘i, where I taught at the time, some having never before left the islands. As might be expected, a few had problems adjusting to a new culture and a very different climate—it was January when we arrived and spitting snow. My job was to help them through these adjustments and to ensure that each returned to Hawai‘i alive and well. All did, thankfully. But I had heard horror stories from previous terms.
    Glancing at the dozen students dining together that evening in Paris, my perceptions still clouded by gloom, I began to imagine the worst: What if one of them turned up dead in some tragic and shocking way?
    This bleak question followed me through my last days in Paris, until I finally tried to answer it in the form of a Surfing Detective mystery. Then I encountered a problem. Why would Kai Cooke investigate a death in Paris? He didn’t speak French. He’d never been to France. And his normal sphere of operations was the six inhabited Hawaiian Islands. My PI was therefore an unlikely detective to take the case.
    I was stuck. Until I saw two connections between him and the proposed victim: Ryan Song, like Kai, would be from Hawai‘i and he would be a surfer. Then I pieced together a scenario in which Kai would investigate Ryan’s death some months later, upon the request of his parents. And due to the Songs’ limited means, Kai would conduct his inquiry without ever leaving the islands. No trip to Paris. That meant a challenging case. How would the PI reconstruct a sequence of events that occurred months earlier and seven thousand miles away?
    Another, lesser, problem was the matter of length. From the beginning I had conceived the case of Ryan Song as a short story rather than a novel. This would mark, in fact, the first time I had attempted a Surfing Detective mystery in this compact form. When I began to write, the case kept growing and growing—beyond the bounds of the short story, but not reaching the length of the novel, or even the novella. So what did I have—a long story? I was pleased to rediscover the term
novelette,
whose length is midway between the short story and novella.
    Novelette describes well
Hanging Ten in
Paris. The
advantages of this form are three: it invites us to see Kai Cooke working a case in more depth than we could in a short story; it has the focus and brevity that allows us to read from beginning to end at one sitting; and, finally, it offers those unfamiliar with the series the opportunity to become acquainted, with little time or expense.

one

    “What the hell did you do?”
    “Get out of my room!” he shouted.
    They struggled, knocking over a small table, anger raging as they fell and he landed hard on the floor.
    “I told you, we all told you to shut your fat face!”
    He didn’t answer. He didn’t even move. No use talking anymore.
    “Oh,my God! Is he dead?”

    * * *

    “It’s Kai Cooke, the Surfing Detective.” My arrival was announced by an assistant to Serena Wright, Director of International Studies at Paradise College in Honolulu.
    “Quite sad about Ryan,” Serena said as I took her hand. I stood almost a foot over her, but what she lacked in stature, she made up in intelligence. She was fortyish, British, and very bright. “I only wish we could put this behind us, Kai.”
    “The Songs are no doubt grieving,” I said as I sat down across from her.
    “That’s not the problem,” she said. “They don’t believe Ryan killed himself. And they think that you—a surfer, like Ryan, and a private detective—can somehow prove he didn’t. I tried the dissuade them, but it was no use.”
    “Thanks for the