Bored to Death: A Noir-otic Story

By Jonathan Ames

The basis for the HBO® Original Series starring Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore), Zach Galifianakis (The Hangover), and Ted Danson, Bored to Death is a Raymond Chandleresque tale of a struggling Brooklyn writer—curiously named Jonathan Ames—who, in a moment of odd whimsy and boredom, becomes a private detective after spontaneously posting an ad on craigslist. As a rank amateur who just thinks he can help, this Ames alter ego quickly becomes embroiled in the search for a missing NYU coed. He moves from one scrape to the next, all while trying to escape a life of periodic alcoholism, dead-end relationships, writer’s block, and hours of Internet backgammon. Bored to Death was originally published in McSweeney’s Issue 24 and is the centerpiece of Ames’s collection of essays and fiction, The Double Life Is Twice as Good.

Bored to Death Artwork © 2009 Home Box Office, Inc. All rights reserved. HBO® and related channels and service marks are the property of Home Box Office, Inc.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribner
• Release date: Oct 6, 2009
• ISBN: 9781439184035

Jonathan Ames

Jonathan Ames is the author of eleven books including Wake Up, Sir!, The Extra Man and You Were Never Really Here, all published by Pushkin Press. He also created the hit HBO comedy Bored to Death, starring Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis and Jason Schwartzman, aswell as Blunt Talk, starring Patrick Stewart. His thriller You Were Never Really Here was adapted for a major Hollywood film by Lynne Ramsay, starring Joaquin Phoenix. The Wheel of Doll is the second book in the series of Happy Doll thrillers that began with A Man Named Doll.Jonathan lives in Los Angeles with his dog Fezzik.

Book preview

Bored to Death

The Origin Story

By

Jonathan Ames

Scribner

New York London Toronto Sydney

Also by Jonathan Ames

I Pass Like Night

The Extra Man

What’s Not to Love?

My Less Than Secret Life

Wake Up, Sir!

I Love You More Than You Know

The Alcoholic

As Editor

Sexual Metamorphosis

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Bored to Death copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Ames

Originally published in The Double Life is Twice as Good in 2009 by Scribner

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Scribner electronic books edition September 2009

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-4391-8403-5

BORED TO DEATH

The trouble happened because I was bored. At the time, I was twenty-eight days sober. I was spending my nights playing Internet backgammon. I should have been going to AA meetings, but I wasn’t.

I had been going to AA meetings for twenty years, ever since college. I like AA meetings. My problem is that I’m a periodic alcoholic, even with going to AA. Every few years, I try drinking again. Or, rather, drinking tries me. It tries me on for size and finds out I don’t fit and throws me to the ground. And so I go crawling back to AA. Or at least I should. This last go-round, I was skipping meetings and just staying home and, like I said, playing Internet backgammon.

I was also reading a lot of crime fiction and private detective fiction, writers like Hammett, Goodis, Chandler, Thompson. The usual suspects, as it were. Since my own life was so dull, I needed the charge that came from their books—the danger, the violence, the despair.

So that’s all I was doing—reading and playing backgammon. I can afford such a lifestyle because I’m a writer. I’m not a hugely successful writer, but I’m my own boss. I’ve written six books—three novels and three essay collections—and at the time of the trouble I had roughly six thousand dollars in the bank, which is a lot for me. I also had a few checks for movie work coming in down the road.

By my economic standards it was a flush time. I had even paid my taxes early, at the end of March—it was now mid-April—and I was just trying to stay sober and keep a low profile in

Reviews for Bored to Death

[datrappert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ames reads his own noir story, namechecking Chandler, Hammett, and Goodis. He writes well, but it's sort of hard to tell if this story is an homage or really serious. Both, I think. It concerns a would-be private eye looking for the sister of his client, a college girl, in New York City. Still, it moves right along, with some good locations, and has a satisfying conclusion. I liked it enough to start on "A Man Named Doll".