When Dad died in 2019 I had the task of going through his papers.
Buried deep in a drawer stuffed with files, newspaper clippings, and notes for story ideas, I discovered the first few chapters of an unseen Rafferty novel.
It had no dates or other details on when it was written, but my guess would be the late eighties—sometime after Fatal Sisters—and there weren’t any other references to it in the rest of Dad’s stuff.
He had always vehemently denied the existence of an elusive ‘unfinished manuscript’ so it was a surprise to find but, with only 40 pages written and no clear view of where the story was heading, I didn’t think too much more about it.
I was already writing Down The Barrel by this point, and I was having trouble. All my attempts at the opening scenes just weren’t landing right.
After digging out Dad’s partial manuscript and reading through it again just for kicks, I realised one of my characters—Herbert Baines—overlapped perfectly with a character Dad had penned. I read it a few more times and thought his scenes with that character might work well as an opening for my story.
So I threw them into the beginning of the draft I was working on, figuring they could be a place to start but that I’d ultimately have to heavily amend them to suit the story as it developed further.
What I didn’t expect was how some of the elements in Dad’s opening became critical pieces to the resolution of the story I was now writing.
I won’t go into more detail here because of ‘spoilers’, but suffice to say that this book would not have been as good if not for those dusty pages I found in the back of Dad’s desk.
So, in the end, I didn’t change much at all about those opening scenes. Other than copyediting, and a character name change, the first chapter of this book you are holding is as originally put down by Rafferty’s creator, W. Glenn Duncan.
Down The Barrel is—and will forever remain—unique in the Rafferty P.I. series, in that it is the only book written by both Dad and me.
He started the ball rolling, then passed it off and let me bring it home.
Even if neither of us knew it at the time.
I kinda like that.