Meet the Commodore!

The history of detection is littered with famous and infamous names. All of these names have their own cliques and clingers-on, people who insist this sleuth is superior to that one for esoteric and endlessly debatable reasons.  But here at Wideload, there is only one gumshoe who can claim to be the absolute best.  That detective is Dorian “The Commodore” Dickens.  And while we are often willful and contrary just for the sake of it, we are inclined to agree with the Commodore - in part because he stopped by Wideload HQ for an interview, and brought some delicious-looking pudding with him.

Our interview with the Commdore took place in the Wideload kitchen, near the bowls and spoons.  We offered some tea to our guest, but he declined, claiming he didn’t want any subpar brew to taint his palate and ruin the taste of the pudding.  We could understand his reluctance; it really did look like delicious pudding.  Our questions to the Commodore are bold; his answers are plain.

So what’s with the pudding anyway?

Eh?

Pudding.  You eat a lot of it.  You’re always talking about it.  You brought some with you today.

This isn’t going to be another one of those interventions, is it?

No, not at all.

Good, because I can tell you now that it simply wouldn’t work. I don’t have a pudding problem. I have a deep and abiding love of the stuff, but it’s not a problem.  I could stop eating pudding whenever I wanted - but why would I ever want to stop eating pudding?

You’ve got me there.

Indeed.  You’ll find I’m usually two or three steps ahead.

Does it help you detect?

What?

The pudding.  Does it aid you in any professional sense?  Is pudding “brain food,” like fish?

I suppose that it has a sort of calming effect on my disposition, in the same way that a cup of warm milk might soothe a sleepless child.  When my mind is calm, I can apply logic and reason to any mysterious situations that come my way, and deduce the true nature of things without too much effort.  I can still do it without the pudding, but it’s not as much fun.  It’s like training a dog to roll over.  Would you rather do it in a beautiful grassy field on a sunny day, or on the deck of a battleship caught in a maelstrom?

I would opt for the field myself.

Precisely.

So describe this pudding you’ve brought for us today.

“For us?” Getting a bit ahead of ourselves, are we not?

It just seemed like you might have enough to share.

Next question.

[It should be noted here that the Commodore had an enormous plastic container of pudding, which smelled tantalizingly of bananas and vanilla.  This interviewer thought there might be enough there to provide a creamy treat for the entire office, but this proved to be an incorrect assumption.]

Um…okay.  Could you tell us a bit about how you came to be known as “the Commodore?”  Is that just a nickname, or were you -

Oh, it’s more than a nickname, I can assure you of that.

So you were in Her Majesty’s Navy at some point?

Why do you assume that?

I thought you were from England originally.  You have an English accent.

That proves nothing.  I could be an accomplished voice actor for all you know.

I suppose that is technically true, but I was really hoping to get a simple “yes” or “no” answer on this one, so I could get back to the matter of why people call you “the Commodore.”

That is classified information, sir.

Classified?

Indeed.

Classified by whom?

I’m afraid that too is classified.

This interview is not going as smoothly as I’d hoped.

It’s your own fault, you know.  You ask quite a lot of questions, but they’re hardly the right questions.  You would never make it in the detective business.

How would you conduct this interview if the shoe were on the other foot?

Most uncomfortably, since my shoes are already on the correct feet and changing that would be-

It was a figure of speech.  You know what I’m getting at.

Well I might have observed the first rule of interviewing.

Which is?

Don’t interview people while they’re trying to eat.

The Commodore pushes the large container of pudding away from him, as if its emptiness offended him somehow.  That’s right, emptiness.  Over the course of our brief and occasionally infuriating interview, the greatest detective the world has ever known consumed a quantity of pudding that might otherwise have been used to satiate a medium-sized orphanage.  Needless to say, we were awed.

The Commodore stood, towering above most of the assembled throng of Wideload employees.  Many had brought t-shirts or photographs they wanted autographed.  One had a printout of Guilty Party’s ranking page on MetaCritic.  A few thoughtful souls brought small store-bought pudding cups, which the Commodore accepted graciously and promised to consume on his lengthy trip back to Dickens Manor.  As if we needed a promise at that point.

I accompanied the Commodore up the stairs to the roof of our building, where his private helicopter waited.  “There’s no pilot,” I said aloud.

“Very observant,” said the Commodore. “Perhaps you’re detective material after all.”  He clambered into the pilot’s seat, carefully setting his bag of pudding cups on the dashboard.  I wasn’t sure if that was against FAA regulations, but the events of the preceding hour had shown I was hardly the right person to question the Commodore about these sorts of things.

“You should come back sometime,” I said, “for a follow-up interview.”

“Perhaps,” said the Commodore.  “If there’s enough interest from the readers of your website.  Or indeed, enough interest from me.”  He barked out a brief laugh.  “That’s a little joke,” he noted.

“So what’s next for you and your family?” I shouted as the helicopter’s rotors whirred to life.

“Funny you should ask,” he said, and launched into an astoundingly detailed description of what the Dickens Detective Agency had planned for the future.  Unfortunately the roar of the helicopter was so loud that I didn’t hear any of it.  The chopper sprang off the office rooftop and into the sky, chasing the setting sun.