Two Sentimental Gentlemen, by Gabriel Valjan

"Two Sentimental Gentlemen," by Gabriel Valjan, in iBlood on the Bayou: Case Closed, edited by Don Bruns, Down and Out, 2025. 

I have a story in this book.

This is the third story by Valjan to grace my blog.

My favorite piece of writing advice from E.B. White is this: Be obscure clearly. This tale is a good demonstration of that principle.

It is New Orleans during Prohibition.  Fawcett and Angel have arrived and are looking for trouble.  Just for starters they are two men checking into a room with one bed, and worse, one of the men is suspiciously dark in color.  (The mayor has a quota, the hotel clerk explains.)  And they deliberately attract the attention of the richest industrialists in the city.

What are they up to?  Well, that's the puzzle, of course, but it isn't what I mean by being obscure clearly. Here we see them entering their hotel room:

The room, dark and carpeted, appeared undisturbed.  There was a large window, curtained, and His and Hers chairs that framed it like brackets.  There was a closet nearest them, a desk next, and the bed with a nightstand to their right.  Another door was ajar, and a dull light illuminated the ceramic tiles in the bathroom, the subway tiles of the wall there, white as Ahab's whale.

See? Nice and clear, with the lovely little metaphor tossed in at the end. But we immediately learn that something unexpected has happened in the room and we won't find out what until much later.  The precision of the description makes it clear that the obscurity that follows is intentional.

A nice historical tale of suspense.