Week 10: Tropes (or ‘The cowboy punched the cow while his wife, dressed in her gingham shirt and gingham apron, watched on with a pot of coffee in her hand’)

For a gumshoe, he was dark, brooding and dangerous. His clients, mostly women wanting to catch their husbands cheating on them so they could get the house, were drawn to him like a moth to a flame—a blowtorch of a flame. Their inhibitions disappeared under his flaming sexuality and many women felt stirrings under their skirts and dresses that they hadn’t felt in a long time.

He wasn’t a ‘nice’ boy; he was rough, rugged and wore his anger like the deep scar on his face, the same face that sported a three day growth. He was powerfully built, the probable result of hours spent in the boxing gym owned and run by ‘Muscles’ McGee, the underworld henchman who almost changed his ways upon being released from The Big House after serving ten years for murder.

When he wasn’t working a case, the gumshoe spent many of his hours punching bags, sparring with regulars, and lifting weights. He was fit, and the women who sought him out somehow knew it from the way he kinda walked, kinda sauntered, and the way his clothes bulged in all the right places.

His name? No one ever knew—everyone just called him ‘Gumshoe’. Clients called him Mr Gumshoe. They guessed that ‘Danger’ was his middle name.