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I’m the best.
    If you’re looking to get all fancy and post-modern, then don’t come a-knocking at my partition door. Because if what you want is a lot of psychological fol-de-rol and a tormented detective with a drink problem and a broken marriage, who’s coming to terms with a tragedy that happened in his youth and is reaching out to his feminine side, then buddy you’ve come to the wrong address.
    But if your taste is for a hard-nosed, lantern-jawed, snap-brimmed-fedora’d, belt-knotted-trenchcoated, bourbon-swigging, Camel-smoking, lone-walking, smart-talking, pistol-packing, broad-smacking, mean-fighting, hot-pastrami-biting, tricky-case-solving son-of-a-goddamn-prince-among-men, then knock at the door and walk right in and ask for me by name.
    And the name to ask for is Woodbine. As if you hadn’t guessed.
    Lazlo Woodbine, Private Eye.
    Some call me Laz.
    You see me, I keep it classic and I keep it simple.
    I work just the four locations. An office where my clients come. A bar where I talk a load of old toot and where the dame that does me wrong bops me on the head at the beginning of the case. An alleyway, where I get into tricky situations, and a rooftop where I have my final confrontation with the villain.
    No spin-offs, no loose ends and all strictly in the first person. No great genre detective ever needed more than that and no detective ever came greater than me.
    So, with that said, and pretty goddamn well said too, let’s get us down to the business in hand and begin it the way that it always begins.
    And it always begins like this.
     
    It was another long hot Manhattan night and I was sitting in Fangio’s, chewing the fat with the fat boy. The fat boy’s name was Fangio, but the fat we chewed went nameless.
    It had been a real lean year for me and I hadn’t had a case to solve with style since the big one of ’98. Times were getting tough.
    It’s all well and good being hailed as “the detective’s detective”, and having your craggy silhouette on the cover of
Newsweek
magazine and your office featured in
Hello!
, but fame won’t buy you a ticket to ride if you don’t have the fare for the ferryman.
    At the present, I was down.
    My bank account was redder than a masochist’s butt and the trench had washed out of my trenchcoat. The trusty Smith and Wesney Snipes was gathering rust in Papa Legba’s pawnshop and my now legendary snap-brim seemed to suit my landlord who had taken it in lieu of last month’s rent.
    I was down.
    Down. Down.
    Deeper and down.
    I was deeper and down than a pit lad’s purse in a pocket of Pleistocene pumice. More at sea than a Lascar’s lunch on a leaking Liberian lugger. Further south than a tired Tasmanian’s toe-jam tucker-bag take-away.
    But hey, when you’re deeper and down as that, my friends, the only way is up. You can’t just sit there on your sorry ass, waiting for the wind of fortune to blow in your direction.
    You have to lift yourself high above adversity.
    You have to make your own wind.
     
    “Holy humdinger,” flustered Fangio, fanning his face with his fat. “If you make wind in my bar one more time, Laz, I’ll kick your sorry ass out.” Oh how we laughed.
    “I’m not kidding,” the fat boy flustered further. “I put up with a lot from you, Laz. The running gags about your trenchcoat and your trusty Smith and West Bromwich Albion. The dame that does you wrong always bopping you on the head in my bar.
And
you calling me the fat boy all the time. But I do draw the line at you making wind. I’m running a business here.”
    “But you
are
a
very
fat boy,” says I, faster than a ferret in a felcher’s footbath.
    “
And
those dumb surrealistic metaphor jobbies you insist on using all the time because you think it gives you your own style. The ones that gradually get more and more obscene and obscure and are neither funny nor clever.”
    “Ease up, Porkie,” says I. “I may be down, but I’m far from out.”
    “Do you want to settle