This is the second appearance here by Jim Fusilli.
Betty's point: You don't send money back. You don't negotiate out of insecurity. You push hard. You demand.
My question: Do they really want me?
Paul has written a treatment for a movie based on the life of musician Nick Drake and now he is flying to France to talk to a studio interested in making the flick. He is afraid he is not good enough. His much-younger wife Betty clearly thinks he is not ambitious enough. (He suspects she only stays married to him to provide a father figure for her son.) And it turns out a famous A-list actor is on their flight, someone Betty thinks he should find a way to talk to...
That's all I will tell you about the plot. There are two things that made this story stand out for me.
One is Fusilli's use of real people and institutions. I think most writers would have had their fictional characters fly on Paris Airlines to talk to executives at Seine Studio, but he just flat out says Air France and Canal+. And Nick Drake too, was a real-life person. Niall Nelson, of course, is not real, but you don't have to be an addict of Hollywood gossip shows to guess what sixty-ish Irish action star Fusilli is invoking.
The second element is a very blunt form of foreshadowing. Early twentieth-century crime writer Mary Roberts Rinehard is credited/blamed with being the queen of the "Had I But Known" school of writing, in which suspense is created by lamenting bad decisions.
Fusilli doesn't do the lamenting but he simply warns us that bad things are about to happen. It was one of those men, I later learned, who set out to harm us. That's the first of several notes.
I feel like it shouldn't work but it certainly does. Good story.
