Afterword
Hector Douglas came about as a result of a novel I was working on which eventually became Wake Up And Dream. I knew by then it was going to be set in Los Angeles, and also that it would involve an invention which allowed for the recording of emotion—the thing that, in the finished work, took over the entertainment industry and much else besides, which I borrowed from Huxley’s Brave New World and called “the feelies.”
I’d also long fancied the idea of writing about a ludicrously committed salesman. Someone so committed, in fact, that their commitment goes beyond rationality and into homicide. Which is when Hector Douglas stepped onto the scene. So I sent Hector out into the Los Angeles suburbs, and he seemed to like what he found, and, for a while, I liked what I was writing and thought he might be a key character in my novel. Inside his shiny black case was… Well, perhaps a patented invention which had some resonance with the whole technology of the feelies which I was developing. I could call in the Psiclean…
But Hector wandered. Hector dawdled. Hector did too little and thought too much. And what exactly was a Psiclean? And if he was going around killing people, why would he need to actually sell anything? There were answers, I’m sure, to all of those questions, but perhaps the story you’ve just read explains what my problem was more clearly. Hector Douglas, the real Hector I came to believe in, only cares about two things, and they are selling and death. He doesn’t need bosses or conspiracies or all the other things I wanted to put into my novel. He doesn’t need anything. He doesn’t even need the feelies. He’s a simple creature, and it’s a simple enough tale, and I’m pleased I finally liberated Hector to wander the Los Angeles suburbs so I could tell it, freed almost entirely, but for a couple of near-gratuitous references, from the shackles of the umbilical cord which had once tied Hector to my novel.
Oh, and by the way—
Yes, I have worked in sales. Not quite door to door, although I have certainly stood on plenty of doorsteps and rang many bells and waited to see who or what would emerge along the hall. So do let me know if you’d like me to fix you up with an endowment life insurance policy that’s (almost) absolutely guaranteed to pay off your mortgage when it matures. Or, that doesn’t appeal, maybe I can interest you in something else…?