Thursday, October 25, 2007

"Breakfast Anytime", by Bryon Quertermous

From: SHOTS Magazine, Summer 2005

"There are very few clean places in Detroit, but way down Gratiot Avenue, near Detroit City Airport, is a whole different level of dirty."

And that's where Detective Atkins and Detective Birney from Internal Affairs wait for their informant in a dingy diner. When the snitch shows up they barely have time to exchange pleasantries before a masked man pumps two shots into his back.

Atkins gives chase but could only watch helplessly as the shooter jumps into a car that speeds off down the street. Directly into the path of a tractor-trailer, which crumples it like a used beer can.

And that's where it gets weird.

A brief review can't do it justice, but this story rocks. Quertermous uses a nonlinear narrative structure to jump around in time, showing us both what led up to the murder as well as Atkins and Birney trying to piece together what happened. Most stories with flashbacks end up as dismal failures, but not this one - the time frame may move around but the story plunges ahead.

And that's what I liked best about "Breakfast Anytime" - it races along with gleeful abandon, the pedal flat on the floor. It's obvious that Bryon had a lot of fun writing it, and I expect you'll have fun reading it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks, man. This is one of my favorites so I'm glad someone else liked it.

The time jump stuff developed interestingly enough from two seperate stories that I couldn;t do anything with on their own. So I combined them and bounced back and forth figuring out how they meshed. It was indeed fun.

JJ Stickney said...

Fun story - thanks for the tip.