Pushkin

About a year ago, I got my hands on this novel, unpublished but apparently based on a true story.

It was written by this guy Ned Timbins.

The overarching plot was pure pulp.

I mean, you could imagine the movie starring Steven Segal and definitely straight to video.

It tells the story of a newbie FBI agent named Ned from Detroit who grows a full-man-choo mustache,

goes undercover in a violent outlaw biker gang, and infiltrates a secret syndicate that smuggling hundreds of thousands of pounds of pot into the country.

And all that leads eventually to the invasion of a foreign country and the arrest of a brutal dictator.

Skeptical? Yeah, so is I. See, I'm a journalist and my specialty, if you can even call it that, is stories that seem too crazy to be true,

stories that are on the verge of urban legend.

Most of them turn out to be bullshit, which doesn't bother me. That's kind of the crux of my job actually, sorting through the bullshit.

So naturally, I had to go meet this guy.

One, two, one, two.

Tell me where we are.

Your office, like described where we are.

We're in a commerce taunget machine.

Yeah, give me a little more than that. How long have you had your office here?

18 years.

Ned is now in his early 70s. Walks with a limp. He's bald, but you wouldn't know it because he likes to wear a weather beaten camo hat.

Nowadays, he's a private eye. His office is beige in a beige corporate park. Totally forgettable. Except for the bear.

It's the first thing you see when you walk up, a 10-foot-round bear, taxidermy in the classic, rearing up to eat you pose.

Ned tells me he got the bear on a hunting trip in Alaska.

...