Guest Post: It Don’t Come Easy by Tom Milani

 

Please welcome back author Tom Milani to the bog today…

 

It Don’t Come Easy

 

When Adam Meyer invited me to contribute to In Too Deep: Crime Stories Inspired by the Songs of Genesis, I was thrilled because (a) he’s a good friend and (b) he let me have the song “Misunderstanding.” The official video for that song is perfect noir: man waits by a payphone in the rain for his girlfriend to answer, eventually gives up and drives to her place, where he sees another guy emerging.

Seems like the story should write itself, right? Then how did Little Bijou enter the picture? More on that in a moment.

In my first draft, I had the woman be a high school crush of my protagonist’s, who’s back in town to solicit his help in getting rid of her husband. Never mind that this is well-trod territory (hello, James M. Cain), I pushed on. I had a couple of different endings, the only variations being who died (husband in one; protagonist and husband in the other). The murder was arranged to look like an accident. The protagonist sabotaged a stairway leading to his crush’s basement. Unfortunately, my wife (first reader with a degree in interior design) pointed out to me that stairways aren’t constructed the way I’d envisioned.

In my second draft, I decided to pursue a comic route. This time, my protagonist and the woman planned to kidnap the husband’s dog (Little Bijou), offering to trade the dog in exchange for the husband’s agreeing to walk away from their marriage. At some point, my protagonist changed his mind, deciding to keep the dog and leave the girl. Even I couldn’t stomach it.

Which led to the third draft. Here, everything changed. The high school crush became an ex-girlfriend. The protagonist had unresolved trauma of his own. I took the pain of his apparent betrayal (one misunderstanding) and his ex-girlfriend’s indifference (another misunderstanding) and increased the stakes for all the parties involved. My own misunderstanding of how easy the story would be to write led, finally, to something truer to the theme of the song, if far darker.

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Tom Milani ©2025

Tom Milani (www.tommilani.com) has published short fiction in Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties, Illicit Motions, Janie’s Got a Gun: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Aerosmith, and Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir vol. 5, among other places. “Barracuda Backfire” was published in 2024 as Book 4 of Michael Bracken’s Chop Shop series of novellas. His first novel, Places That Are Gone, will be published on May 13, 2025, by Unnerving.