John Chapter had already been murdered once. Apparently, that wasn’t enough.
John Chapter was a celebrated novelist, brilliant, charming and cruel enough to leave a fair amount of wreckage behind him. He was found stabbed through the heart, clutching part of a letter from a woman seven years gone. Meanwhile, the obvious suspect sat in jail, bedeviled by a hangover and unable to remember whether he’d done the deed or not.
I published "Chapter's Bitter End" in 2023 as a short mystery featuring society reporter Lanie Price. There was an ebook, a paperback and an audiobook. Even multiple translations. I considered the matter settled. Chapter was dead, Lanie had done her job and everybody could go home.
Then, a few months ago, I decided to redo the audiobook. That meant reading the manuscript again, and somewhere along the way I noticed a little thing I wanted to improve. I don’t even remember what it was. I do remember thinking, “It’s just one little change. That’s all it’s gonna be.”
I fixed it, and if you know me, you know what happened: I saw another place that needed attention. Then another. Pretty soon I’d stopped rearranging the furniture and knocked a hole through the wall.
There was another room back there.
And Lordy, there were people in it.
The first to get my attention was the last one I expected: the dead man himself. In the short story, John Chapter was just a body, dutifully, appropriately silent. Everybody else got to say who he’d been. He didn't get a word in edgewise.
Well, he’d had enough of that. The man started whispering in my ear, demanding I listen. I kid you not. He was pretty indignant about it, too.
“Six novels. Thirteen years climbing a ladder I built rung by rung. And what did you give them? A man on his back with a scrap of paper in his hand. As if that’s all I ever was.”
He had a point.
The novella honors it. It gives him back his life. The man who walked into a party and watched the room rearrange itself around him. The mentor who could build you up and cut you down in the same breath. And the man who, at the very end, was trying to become a different man than the one he’d been.
Then there were the people who knew him. Turns out, they have opinions. And the minute they realized I was listening, they started to speak up, too.
His longtime rival: “Dead, he’s a tragedy. They’ll name a library after him.”
The woman on his arm: “He was good to me. Real good.”
And the woman whose name is on that letter: “Kill him? There were times I wanted to. Times I imagined it. Even planned it.”
Each of them knew a different John Chapter. None of them agree.
The story grew from 34 pages to 165, give or take a few. That’s more than a hundred new pages of me listening to what they had to say. It's now Chapter's Bitter End: the Novella.
There's a new cover, too.
I loved the original one. It shows Chapter in his tuxedo: handsome, guarded, impossible to read. I love the new cover, too. That red has pizazz. It gives you only his hand, lifeless on a red rug, still holding that letter. But inside, you see far more of who he was.
If you read the short story, you met his corpse. This time, meet the man.
John Chapter’s life is now available for the first time. Yes, he still ends up—or starts out—dead, but that’s neither here nor there.
The point is that this time, you’ll know who you’re mourning.
— Walker
