The Detective Novel

Comedic Monologue originally from 20/20 Questions
Originally performed by Michael Buchanan

Comedic / Male

The speaker pleads with their novelist client about the problems in their upcoming piece. 

PREVIEW

This isn’t the final script, is it? It just doesn’t sound like you. It’s not that it’s bad...per se.
It’s just — okay, it’s not good. I’m just not sure what you’re doing with this. Is the detective
lost? Is she trying to seduce him? There’s a lot of questions that you don’t get answers
too. And I know it’s supposed to be a mystery but come on, nothing gets answered. At
all.

I’m not trying to discredit your genius, but I just want you to take a second look at some
of these descriptions. Like, here you say that “her legs started at her feet and ran all the
way up to her waist”, or “she had two breasts in the middle of her chest that looked like
two breasts.” Okay, another example: “the lamp cast a red glow across the casino which
made the entire place appear red.” Or how about, “the smoke hung in the air like it was
smokey OR SOMETHING.” You even say or something in here. That’s not being clever
— that’s just saying what smoke does.