A Description of Mr. Grot

The boys took their usual photographs of the corpse, and then Head honcho assigned us to the job of investigating Mr. Grot's death.

From what I understood at the time (the time which is not concurrent with the date on this post, for legal reasons), Mr. Grot had no first name. He was just born "Mr. Grot." Became an esquire at age five, might have been eight, always hard to tell with these cases. Either that or I'm just a really bad detective. Spent his teenage years hitchhiking trains, striking deals with blues musicians in exchange for their souls, and playing a lot of ragtime piano in saloons. Somewhere in the west, you know exactly where I'm talking about. This was back in the early 20th century.

Mr. Grot graduated at the College of Hard Knocks with a Ph.D in Psychology. Freud was a big influence on him. The two were good drinking buddies until Mr. Grot killed him in a horrible accident involving tying Freud to a bear and setting it loose upon Moscow. I think that was him. Either way, something or other involving an accident with someone or other resulted in Mr. Grot seeing his first dead body, and from there he progressed into a full-fledged criminal and sought to join the Fearsome Pantheon of Really Monomaniacal and Hubristic Villains. They turned him down, saying their positions were full. Offered him an internship. He accepted.

Since Mr. Grot now had that job as an intern, he didn't need his day job striking deals with blues musicians, so he gave that to his secretary, Samuel "Jack of All" Beckett. You can see where this is going if you know anything about historical figures.

Grot set up shop in this city a few years back. Kept changing his address. Set up a massive corporation that sold video rights. Apparently used that as a front to smuggle vlogs over the border. Kids these days really need their fix, and Mr. Grot was just the man to give it to them.

Looks like someone else was just the man and/or woman to give it to him too. I'm too tired to write snarky detective wit. But an ace detective doesn't sleep. He just gets tired. It sucks being an ace detective, is the general theme I'm trying to get across here.

With Mr. Grot's dead body, we found 20,000 pages of mad scribblings scattered across notebooks, typescripts, random sheets of paper, you name it. The man was obsessed with something in the years preceding his death. We were hoping they could give us some clues as to who killed him.

Then we realized one of Mr. Grot's aliases was "James Joyce." Those 20,000 pages were Finnegans Wake.

That's when Coldems and I called a coffee break.