The History of Inspector Foxglove
Various bits and pieces I created for Foxglove - in recent years - have been sitting on a hard drive, and I've not known what to do with them in light of everything. I had, for a short while, considered posting what was written, along with various logos, sketches, and the sort, but it has always felt inappropriate to do so. The more time I spend not dealing with the character, the more important it feels to outline how I got here, and why there's not going to be a book being made available any time soon.
There's probably an .iso, on an archive site somewhere, with all the JavaScript files for all the games I wrote back in the day. All told I must have written over a hundred of them, mostly ranging from mediocre to terrible, but I was getting paid by the game, not by the word, and certainly not by quality - nearly all of which could be played (or at least completed) by a competent adult within a few minutes. For a while, before the introduction of smartphones, these represented a solid income for any writer with the ability to stretch out a story into multiple paths, and they apparently sold well enough for small companies to have several people churning them out.
Not that anyone creating them received anywhere near what they made, mind you. The art on them was handled by people who knew what they were doing, so that’s where at least some of the money went.
I've never thought about looking for copies, mostly because I would likely be horrified at the compromises which were routinely made. Given how many copies were sold it's a safe bet that they still exist somewhere, ready to reappear at some point to embarrass my future self. It's roughly twenty years now since I finally worked up the courage to leave that job, and in all that time the only thing I've ever regretted not touching back on was an (always unnamed in-game) detective who appeared in around a dozen or so games towards the end of my tenure.
You would never know it from those games, but there was an entire history, mythos, and personal life hidden just beneath his crude bitmap representation which made it to people's phones.
That protagonist was, in my scripts, initially referred to as Fabian, before someone - likely one of the managers tasked with watching over us lowly creatives, so that nothing truly shocking ever made it through development - decided to step in an tell me to knock it off. I can't remember, and it doesn't really matter. All of those scripts were likely saved, as they had to be handed up through various people, and each signed off on. It was probably two or three games in that I had to figure out who this character was, no longer being Fabian, and the best place to contemplate such weighty matters was (at the time) in a pub.
Before the smoking ban, when a person could spend a solid three hours hanging out, drinking, smoking, and talking, there was a much different atmosphere to pubs I frequented. It wasn't an essential aspect of spending time in these establishments, but I made a note of which had pool tables (a plus), or a television (again, a plus), and which had jukeboxes (a black mark), so that there was enough stimulation to keep everyone from getting too maudlin.
One of the artists who provided all the "cute kitten" images in bitmap tended to get very, very dark. He hated providing pictures for the kids games just as much as I hated writing them, and would - between jobs - create images of these same cats sitting in ovens, or being fed to sharks, or anything to keep from going insane. I doubt anyone above us knew of these, or, if they did, nobody ever said anything. I wrote hundreds of filthy limericks during this period so I have no right to pass judgement.
This was back at a point when televisions in pubs were invariably switched to channels which showed music videos. You could drink for hours and not hear the same track twice. Do any of those channels still exist, or has YouTube seen them all off? Whatever the case, this is where lowly writers and artists for ‘phone games spent our time, devising ways to keep working without losing our minds.
Accepting that I am, perhaps, overplaying slightly how fantastic an era this was, I'll admit that there may be a haze of alcohol filtering my memories. There were plenty of less pleasurable moments, but we (mostly) behaved ourselves, and we knew to steer clear of places which had reputations. Well... we steered clear once we had been informed of these reputations, which may or may not have been after we had already been drinking there. One particular bar, pointed out by a loose acquaintance, was rumoured to have had at least one glassing occur within it's walls, but none of that was ever seen personally.
It was at an old, round, wooden table, covered in drinking mats (advertising whatever beers were on tap), empty glasses, and a Guinness ashtray (they were always Guinness ashtrays) where I laid out the basics. I figured that this now-nameless detective, being from the forties or fifties - so we could use my slight obsession with Robert Fabian to the fullest - needed a backstory and a personality.
Although it wasn't airing - and I highly doubt that I would have seen it on VHS, if it was ever released on that format - I had read enough books about Robert Fabian to know that there was a few decent stories to be told with him as protagonist. I have no idea why he, of all detectives, stuck with me.
I needed a character who could have slid into an old Ealing film without too much modification, and something about Fabian - his disposition, demeanour, as well as a strange hardness behind his eyes - always intrigued me. There had been a lot of old interviews shown on British television throughout the eighties, and he cropped up just enough to stick in the mind. We don't really get the same shows broadcast now, looking back on people who made an impact on various aspects of culture. It wasn't just old interviews shown again, but there would be adverts as well - all rich pickings for someone a young mind fascinated with strange bits of the past.
We brainstormed over lukewarm beer. I wanted a name which started with F to tie my detective character, however loosely, to Fabian in my mind. We went through a lot of names, most of them terrible. Inspector Fotherington? Searle would have had me strung up. Inspector Fawkes? I didn't need associations with someone who tried to blow up parliament hanging over proceedings. Farnborough, Fell, Foster, Forshaw, Felling... I think I arrived at Inspector Foxglove through desperation as much as inspiration, although that's no bad thing.
This name ran off the tongue with enough ease that it felt right. This name also suggested the character might be a tad stranger than any Scotland Yard inspirations might provide. The kind of character who would put shillings on the closed eyes of a corpse, or who might stop to note fairy rings in a field of grass... Absolutely rooted in whatever policing traditions his position and function demanded, sure, but open to weirder aspects as well.
Foxglove had to drive something beautiful. There was much aggravation about this, as getting any kind of detail into the tiny images accompanying my text was difficult enough at the best of times, but when I started suggesting all manner of esoteric automobiles from the thirties it became a bone of contention. I think we limited mention of his car to hints in the text rather than any visual appearance, though I'm not entirely certain now. Whatever I settled on back then, right now - because I created him, and I can state his definitive auto of choice - I'd likely put him in a yellow and black Alvis 4.3l touring car. Something that says "I know what I am doing," but isn't so extravagant as to draw unwanted attention.
While many people looking at those games, or the character, might have suspected that the inspiration lay in Foyle's War (which began a couple of years earlier), I hadn't actually seen any episodes of that series at that point. And, because nothing ever reaches an audience unmolested when there is more than a single person involved, Foxglove became a non-smoker in all of the images which were created. I honestly don't know why, but it always struck me that a detective working in that era would very likely be a chain-smoker, with their brand probably being unfiltered high-tar Woodbines.
Woodbines were always the preserve of the older generation, and it somehow gelled that this was who he was. The more time I spent thinking about him, the clearer he became - starched white cotton shirts, woollen suits, a hat probably purchased eight or nine years prior, yet still wearable...
Before anyone goes and thinks that I was creating high art with these games, a little reality check is in order: most of what I produced had a limited number of "screens" available, so whatever story I had in mind needed to be incredibly compressed. These were barely above the level of any Spot the Clue strips, if that. My sole exuberance was in fashioning dead ends and multiple endings, usually with three options available, sometimes only two conclusions.
We reused the “better luck next time” screen on almost everything. Given how many games were released, millions of people probably saw that same damn screen.
Here's something for people to be horrified at - not a single game took more than a week to plot, break down, and write accompanying text for. Many (especially the pet games) were bashed out in an afternoon, my soul withering with each sentence I laid down. To this day I haven't a clue why anyone, having bought and downloaded one of the games, would continue to purchase them. Someone must have thought them interesting, or worth the expense to pass a few minutes, but their popularity was always a puzzle. I wasn't complaining, mind you, as they paid for a vast collection of old books and magazines.
As much as I enjoyed what money came my way, we were constantly screwed over. Everyone missed out on bonuses continually, and nobody I knew ever got a pay rise, no matter how well any game sold, and no matter their talent. With each subsequent snub from management, and with each inane rule enacted, everyone I had enjoyed working with left, one by one. It’s not clear whether the owner ever knew about how things were being handled, but we barely saw him, save for at a distance, coming or going from whatever meetings were taking place.
My patience was pushed to it's very limit when an edict came down stating that there could be no murders within any of the games. I made my case that this hurt our mystery games, and would limit the types of stories we could create, as it made involving a detective into a story more difficult. The rule stood. Seeing that it was likely a matter of time before I was fired, I started looking for work elsewhere.
Over a decade passed before I thought about Foxglove again. It wasn't an immediate "I have a story" moment, but a whole range of ideas which coalesced into him impinging on my thoughts. Most stories tend to come in dribs and drabs, and I scribbled down my ideas in cheap A5 notebooks while I went about other things. By 2014 or 2015, just around the time I started seriously looking for a publisher, he seemed to be in my thoughts more often than not. Then the German deal was signed, and I had to focus on getting a bunch of material written, putting aside any thought of a complicated mystery - I wrote from 8am, stopping for dinner around 5pm, then continued to the small hours of the morning. This lasted for nearly six months.
More time passed.
I came up with a fiendishly complicated little plot that didn't feel like anything comparable, and it desperately needed a historic setting. Having spent a ridiculous amount of time over the years amassing ways in which instant communication could be mitigated, I'd had enough of playing around the edges and wished to omit all the convenience of modernity - setting the story in the 1940s would provide exactly the set-up I needed. I was also acutely aware that rights to the character might be best described as complicated, so I never really pushed myself to get it finished.
Last summer, before everything got insanely complicated, I tried to reach out to the owner of that games company, knowing it was likely he might have something to say. I also wanted to catch up - to see what he had been doing in the interim, and possibly have drinks. The 'phone number I had was no longer in use, so I took to searching for him on the internet. This is where I learned he died back in 2017, not even reaching his fiftieth birthday.
So many people have become former acquaintances that it wasn't truly a shocking discovery, but it did give me pause to reconsider proceeding with any work on a Foxglove book. It may have been clear that the character bore little relation to the one in any game, yet I knew they were one and the same. Knowing this, and knowing there was no simple way to clear the rights, I stopped writing.
I don't know why news of his death precipitated a headache, but it did. For a few weeks I went back and forth on reaching out to his wife - his widow - and seeing if she would consider selling me the rights to everything I worked on (mostly to ensure the truly awful crap never saw the light of day again), but it felt too opportunistic, and seedy - vulgar, somehow - and I didn't want to talk to a woman, whom I barely knew, about how I once worked for her late husband.
And even if I did reach out, how the hell would I put a price on largely worthless rights to outdated games? Any move on my part would have been unseemly, and I'd rather not be the source of more stories of bad behaviour.
Inspector Foxglove deserves at least momentary reflection given that it is entirely likely that he's the first character I ever wrote specifically as a recurring character. None of his mysteries were particularly complex, but I did my best to keep them from being dull. It was only when I started writing this that I looked out my old 'phones - of the half dozen which sit in a drawer here, none of them have any games on them. These 'phones are all probably too modern to run those games, even if I had easy access to them, and that's a non-starter. I'm tempted, knowing that the passing of years is providing as many losses as wins - probably more, on average - to reach out to others from that time.
Maybe Inspector Foxglove will return, at some point, but I don't feel like writing him just at the moment.