An Officer & a Crook by More Than Novellas--Chapter One

This little 6 chapter novella was published in 2006.  It was a group effort by several people.  Each different person writes in a different color and conveniently writes their name and date on the upper right hand corner of their section, like any good middle school student.  The authors are Rachel, Crystal, Sarah, Elizabeth, and an incredibly vague Mrs. Brown.  So, yeah--it's written like those "chain" stories bored English teachers had you do.  It may or may not take place in 2005.

The scene:  In a police station, a young lady in a denim jacket sits on a chair with uneven legs.

Except it's not written that well.  It's cancerous.  To spare you the cancer, I won't have a caption.  Fuck it misery loves company.  Group chemo!

"Her hands were cold. She slid them into the pockets of her denim jacket and wished for her leather coat she'd bought last year. Temperatures were dropping. It would be cold when she went outside."

I actually stared at the page for over a minute just trying to decide which sentence to force on you.  You're welcome.

Was anyone still wearing denim jackets in 2005?  And was there a reason we needed that much garbage to communicate that "it's cold"?  It looks like she's cold now--so why say she would be cold when she went outside?  Do you mean she'd be colder?  It goes on to describe how cold she is presently in the most boring way possible:

"She was so cold."

No shit.

I'm really not cherrypicking here--there isn't a good description of how she can use her nose drippings as a pair of chopsticks or that she's shivering--just ordinary "She's cold" bull shit.

She begins a prayer that kind of peters out pointlessly.

Rachel is a bit better at writing.

The character (whose name we still don't know) is cold and a police officer gives her his jacket and asks if she'd like some coffee.  He just... walks up to her and wraps his jacket around her shoulders without asking.  What a fucking creep.  She gives it back to him.

Mrs. Brown is the brains of the operation, finally giving the character a name:  Deanna.

Brown cuts to a flashback of Deanna getting arrested and brought in for questioning.  Seriously--a flashback only a few paragraphs into the book.  Why not just start with the flashback and move forward in time?

There's a bit of an action scene here, but not enough drama to be absorbed in it:  Deanna witnesses an attack.  Two larger guys with a high sneak creep up on a smaller guy and club him in the back.

Acting on superhero instincts, Deanna runs to the rescue with her trusty briefcase, which she hits the thugs with.  So this chick has a briefcase and wears a denim jacket.  Where the fuck are you going needing a briefcase where you wear a denim jacket?

Just hurry up and take the fucking picture or I swear to fuck I will cut you.

Apparently, this chick is buff too, because she "knocked him sprawling" with one hit from her briefcase.  What the hell is in her briefcase?  Later on, Rachel describes her as "small and frail", so make of that what you will.

The victim runs away and one of the attackers gives chase, but the other grabs her and forces her to the ground, which is when I start to think maybe this isn't the right book for this blog, then it says she "barely had time to start praying".

Police show up, so apparently someone did the responsible thing and called the police instead of attacking two armed, violent people with a briefcase.  The police, for some reason, arrest her along with the attacker and she, per previous narrative, has deemed it in her best interest to not cooperate with the police and refuse to talk.

Then we learn--the people she attacked were plainclothes officers arresting someone.  With a club.

This was apparently written in Canada.  Is it perfectly legal and okay for police officers to walk up to someone they are trying to arrest and club them from behind without the other's knowledge?  I feel like this is an "excessive force" issue.  I briefly looked up taser laws and while they aren't a club, apparently that's only okay if someone is resisting arrest.  Somehow, I feel like Mrs. Brown didn't spend the two minutes of Googling that I did on the subject.

So, naturally, the police suspect her to be in cahoots with the "dangerous criminal" and was defending him so he could make an escape.

This is the problem with a collaborative work:  They're already contradicting one another.  Rachel wrote that Deanna (then nameless) was determined not to speak to the police, then Brown says that Deanna happily gave a statement.

I'm perfectly willing to accept Deanna having a few split personalities--it makes each author make more sense too.

Rachel, deciding we need some drama, writes Deanna suddenly growing a backbone.  She tells the officer that the police are acting like criminals.  She's not wrong--they just attacked a guy with a freaking club.

Sarah takes the wheel, switching perspectives to the officer Deanna is speaking to (John) and there is so much wrong with the narrative.

First, she describes the police as "The Order of Police", which by the way is a Fraternity.

Not culty at all.

Next, she describes a fear of the police as "healthy".  I recognize that it's healthy for most black people to historically fear police, considering how likely they are to be murdered by them, but the character just thinks it's healthy to be afraid of the police, which is... kind of psychotic, frankly.  Respect is fine, but why the fuck would you want people to be actively afraid of you?  That just means they're less likely to ask for help--isn't that what you're fucking for?

I digress.

Then Sarah has an entire paragraph of sentence fragments that I won't make you suffer through.

Brown to the fore:  This author writes like she wants to do the whole thing herself but apparently doesn't have the imagination to do it.

For some reason, they just let a suspect that assaulted two police officers sit in the waiting room, not even cuffed to a chair, and think it appropriate to bring her to face the real criminal.

Apparently, Deanna is a young girl, possibly a teenager from the sounds of it, and an orphan.  Why a teenager is wearing a denim jacket and has a briefcase is beyond me.  According to the opening section, she also owns a leather jacket--much less strange--but the implication here is that she's poor, dude.  It's almost like they never even spoke to one another about the direction they wanted to take this.

Brown reuses the "began to shake" twice in this chapter--yawn.

Deanna starts reciting the Lord's Prayer and they put her in front of the "dangerous criminal" so that the arrested man can identify her.  I was under the assumption that this was done with photos in literally every other form of media, but that is too realistic isn't as dramatic.

Will Deanna be accused as an accomplice?  Will John stop being a dickhole?  Will the criminal be able to smell her pussy?  Find out next week on Holy Shit Literature!