The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories)

by Bernico, Bill

  I had no idea how to go about the writing process. That is, I didn’t know which was the correct way to start writing. Should I write it in the first person perspective or stand back and report on Matt’s movements as an observer? I decided on the latter and this was my opening sentence to my first novel:

  The body wasn’t even cold when Matt walked in and found it there, slumped over his desk.

  The finished story became Welcome, Matt, my first Matt Cooper story. Years later, after I’d written several other Matt Cooper stories in the first person, I went back over this first story and laboriously changed the third person references to first person. The result was a mess. I missed several occurrences and I ended up with a mixture of first and third person perspective within the story.

  I didn’t start out to create a whole series of Matt Cooper stories. As far as I knew, Welcome, Matt was my one and only stand-alone detective story. But I got the itch to write again and just as a writing exercise, I started writing about a man getting shot. Again I had no idea where I was going with this but after those first three paragraphs, I decided to see how many different ways I could describe someone getting killed.

  This was never intended to be a complete story, just a writing exercise. But before long I’d written more than a dozen descriptions of different people getting killed. From there I went back and changed each victim’s name alphabetically. That is, the first victim’s last name was Abrams. The second victim’s name was Branigan and the third victim’s name was Carlson. Before long it dawned on me that this could turn into a story about an alphabet killer, but I’d heard of a book by that title already and branched off in another direction with the story.

  After a few more pages of people getting killed in different ways it occurred to me that the victims could all have been in the same graduating class as Matt, so the story at that point became The Reunion, my second Matt Cooper Story.

  By the time I’d started writing my third Matt Cooper story I decided that Matt should have a back-story of some kind. I had originally put him at odds with his former boss, Sergeant Dan Hollister and I’d said that Matt was once on the Los Angeles police force. Matt and Dan didn’t get along initially, but occasionally found themselves thrown together for a case. As the stories progressed, I found it easier and more interesting for Matt and Dan to develop an actual friendship and working relationship. That’s why you may notice that by the time Dan Hollister dies in Sgt. Cooper’s Lonely Hearts Club Frame, the 36th installment in the series, that they are best friends and Matt is devastated by Dan’s death.

  Anyway, in this third installment, titled, Cold Cash, Matt is on the trail of a counterfeiter, Emil Becker. It may be interesting to note that as far as names for some of my characters go, I pulled them out of thin air. In other cases, I used the names of people I’d known in my lifetime. I’ve already explained where Matt’s name came from. Dan Hollister was a total fabrication. I just liked the sound of the name. Dan’s subordinate, Jerry Burns was a composite of two people I’d known—Jerry Hahn, whom I worked with in real life, and Nick Burns, my high school history teacher.

  You may also notice that several stories into the series that I’d forgotten which names I’d given to which characters and got them mixed up. For instance, coroner Jack Walsh showed up later as coroner Andy Walsh. Once I caught that mix-up I went back and changed all the Andys to Jacks. However, as the storyline progressed past that 1940s and into the 1950s and 60s, characters got old and died. Such was the case with Jack Walsh. He died and was eventually replaced by a younger M.E. named Andy Reynolds. Welcome back, Andy.

  As for our counterfeiter, Emil Becker’s name goes, when I was ten years old, my next-door neighbor was a man named Emil Neubauer. I’d never heard the name Emil before, especially since it was pronounced “A-Mul”. The name stuck in my mind for decades before I decided to use it as one of my characters.

  As I began writing more and more Matt Cooper stories, it was only natural that I’d forget some of the back-stories that went with each character. For instance, in the 11th Matt Cooper story, The Case Of The Plates, Officer Jerry Burns was shot and killed by a sniper. A few stories later he rose from the dead to appear in a later Matt Cooper story. Once I caught that mistake, or maybe it was pointed out to me, I went back and changed the newer occurrence of Jerry Burns to some other officer. Jerry did return, however, in the flashback sequences of Matt Cooper story number forty, End Of An Era. I decided to tell how Matt first met Jerry Burns in that episode.

  Months later, after my break from Matt Cooper stories to write other short stories, I set about writing about murders that had a connection to the Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes. Like The Reunion, this just started out as an exercise in writing to see how many Mother Goose rhymes I could turn into murders. There were quite a few as it turned out and before the story was finished, I went back and changed any occurrence of the generic cop in this piece to Dan Hollister of the L.A.P.D. Naturally his buddy, Matt Cooper would get involved in solving the case. This writing exercise turned out to be Matt Cooper story number five, The Mother Goose Murders.

  Several years after I’d written The Mother Goose Murders, I happened to be channel surfing on my television and came across an old movie from 1930 called The Bishop Murder Case with Basil Rathbone. As I read the movie’s description on the screen I was surprised to learn that it was about murders that had some connection to the Mother Goose rhymes. I’d never even heard of the movie when I wrote my story, but there it was. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who had thought of this connection.

  A few weeks passed and I found myself sitting across from my wife in a restaurant. As we waited for our food, I looked at the salt and pepper shakers and just started thinking out loud. I said something to Kathie about not being sure if the salt shakers might have been tampered with while other people used the booth we were now occupying. I wondered how easy it could be for someone to open the shaker and insert arsenic into it.

  Well, that was all the premise I needed to start work on my Matt Cooper story number six, The Condiment Killer. Like all the other Matt Cooper stories that had come before it, this one was also set in Hollywood, California. I chose this city for Matt for one main reason. I used to live in Hollywood as a young man and I could easily describe the city and the streets and some of my memories into the Cooper stories. I’d never been to Denver, for example, so I couldn’t very well have Matt Cooper be from Colorado. I wouldn’t know anything about the place to be able to describe it.

  I could have set Matt Cooper in Chicago, since I’d also lived there as a kid, but I liked the idea of Hollywood and it’s glamour as a setting for my P.I. character. I did use the Windy City as a backdrop for Matt Cooper story number eight, Little Matt, in which Matt goes back to the city of his birth to visit family. Once again it was easy to describe the city, the streets, the buildings and the neighborhoods I’d known as a boy.

  Let me go back one story, if I may, to Matt Cooper installment number seven, A Million To One. The interesting thing about this story is that I didn’t originally set out to write a Matt Cooper story when I began writing this tale. For you diehard Raymond Chandler and/or Robert B. Parker fans, you may remember that Chandler died in 1959, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript, Poodle Springs, which Parker finished thirty years later. At the end of that story, Clayton Blackstone’s bodyguard, Eddie Garcia kills Muffy Blackstone right after she kills her father, Clayton. Marlowe has words with Garcia about the cops pouring it on him and Garcia says something like, “If they can find me.” There was also another bodyguard in this story who was referred to simply as J.D. Armed with only this information, I wondered if I couldn’t write a sequel to the Poodle Springs story myself.

  With nothing more than that to go on, I began writing what eventually became A Million To One. I substituted Matt Cooper for Philip Marlowe. Parker’s character, Eddie Garcia became Hector Ruiz, who was really a guy name Alberto Gomez, who had surfaced after nearly seven years in hiding o
nly to find out that police weren’t after him. I kept the J.D. character but gave him an actual name, John Delany Kincaid, and set the wheels of this new Cooper story in motion.

  Cooper stories numbers nine and ten, titled, Find Her and Hard Bargain, started out as very short Cooper stories. In fact, they were so short that they stayed unfinished in my ‘Unfinished’ directory for several years, along with three other Cooper stories, Dead Ringer, The Stickup, and The Last Stop, while I wrote other non-Cooper short stories. I managed to write another really short Matt Cooper story, You Can Bank On It, in the meantime. It was and still is my shortest Cooper story to date, comprised of a mere 2,429 words. However, in this case, the story was perfect as it was. If I’d tried to pad it any further, it would have spoiled it.

  And there I sat for the next few years with ten Matt Cooper stories up on the shelf and five more still unfinished. I spent those years writing more than two hundred non-Cooper short stories and my one and only novel, The Nine Musketeers, an autobiography about growing up in a dysfunctional family in the 1950s and 60s.

  Let’s jump ahead to July of 2011. I’d been in email contact with one of my literary heroes, Lawrence Block. We exchanged emails for a couple of years. During this period, I’d sent more than five hundred inquiries to traditional publishers and agents, trying to get my material in print. I was having no luck but I kept remembering that many famous authors had suffered through more than five hundred rejections before they hit it big, so I kept trying.

  After several years and hundreds of rejections I was commiserating with Mr. Block about my frustration and he suggested that I try going with Amazon.com and their Kindle Direct Publishing program. I’d seen it online for a long time and wondered how someone would go about listing their creations on that site. Well, I tell you that it literally only took that little nudge from Lawrence Block to make me look into the Kindle option a little further. I found out how easy it was and started listing some of the more than two hundred stories I’d already written. I found out that there were some people out there who actually enjoyed my work and they told me so. That, coupled with Mr. Block’s suggestion got me inspired to keep writing more and more short stories.

  I returned to my old friend, Matt Cooper and finished the five stories in my ‘Unfinished’ directory and listed them on Kindle. I soon found out that people liked Matt Cooper and his escapades, which inspired me to write more Matt Cooper short stories. Before Kindle Direct Publishing came along I had a total of fifteen Cooper stories in my collection. That was a year ago. Since then I’ve written more than twenty-six more Matt Cooper entries and now my Cooper collection contained forty-one stories.

  I wrote eleven more Cooper stories and by the time I got to Cooper story number twenty-five, Double Trouble, it became clear that Matt wasn’t progressing as a person, even though he was just a fictional character. I decided that I’d move Matt along in time. I remembered an early Cooper story I’d done called, November Child, in which I took the storyline back one year to 1946. Up until this story, all the Cooper stories took place in 1947 and stayed in 1947 for the first twenty-four stories.

  As a somewhat interesting side note, I wrote November Child based on my own exploits in Hollywood, where I moved in 1971, hoping to break into the motion picture business. The descriptions I wrote in that story were based on my own experiences. I landed only one role, that of an extra in a movie that was then titled, November Children. By the time it was released they had re-titled it Nightmare County. After my experience with that movie, I quickly became disillusioned and returned to Wisconsin to resume my normal life.

  When I wrote Double Trouble I moved the story ahead to 1948, just to give Matt a nudge toward the future. I liked that concept and wrote the next story, Track Record, in 1948 as well. From then on, I decided that I was going to keep Matt moving forward. I also decided that Matt should have a normal family life as well. Beginning with Cooper story number twenty-eight, Love Finds Matt Cooper, I had him meet a girl and start keeping steady company with Amy Callahan. The next story, The Plunge, finds Matt Cooper married to Amy. Both these stories take place in 1949.

  The next logical step in the Cooper saga was for Matt to move ahead into the 1950s and become a father. Clay Cooper came along on July 5, 1950 in the thirtieth installment, Concrete And Clay. From there, the storyline moves ahead to 1955. Clay is now five years old and is spending a lot of time with dad. I decided to jump ahead to 1959 for the next story, ‘Til Death Do Us Part, in which Matt looks into the murder/suicide of his neighbors.

  Now here’s where it starts to get both interesting and complicated. I had originally written Cooper story number nineteen as a futuristic look at the Cooper clan. It was called Cooper Generations, and was intended as a peek into the future. It took place in 2012 and begins at Matt’s graveside with his son, Clay and grandson, Elliott. In this story, I filled in a few missing pieces of Matt’s back-story with tidbits of information about his first wife, second wife, kids, his friends, background and so on. After I’d finished this story I jumped back to 1947 and took up where I’d left off.

  So now I have all these 1947 sagas as well as one from 2012, where the reader knows what will eventually become of Matt Cooper. While it was fun to write, I wish I’d waited until after I’d written the other forty stories before I wrote that one. Starting with Love Finds Matt Cooper and beyond, I had to constantly go back and refer to Cooper Generations to make sure that what happened to him in those stories from the forties held true to the eventual outcome more than fifty years later.

  In Cooper Generations I had some reference to Amy being dead so it would only follow that when I got back to Matt’s life in the late 1950s and early 60s that I’d have to incorporate her death into the upcoming stories, which was what I did in Not On Your Life, where Matt and Amy get mugged on their way home from the movies. Matt is stabbed, shot and left for dead. When he comes around hours later, Amy is dead and Matt spends some time recuperating in the hospital.

  I did something similar with a story called, One Bad Apple. I was still writing Cooper stories based in 1947 and got anxious to see what life would be like for him and his son twenty-five years later so I set the story in 1971 and had his son, Clay joining him in the private investigation business. Once again, it was fun, but it also made me have to be careful when I jumped back to the 1940s and continued with Matt from back then. I eventually moved those two time-jumping stories into their proper places in the Cooper collection and filled in the list with other stories that followed the established storyline set down in them.

  Now that I had Matt married and widowed and raising a son by himself, what else could I do to the poor guy to keep his life interesting? I decided that the people who bought his old house would remodel it and find a skeleton in his basement, behind a brick wall. That in itself wouldn’t prove anything, so I made the skeleton decades old, which would possibly implicate Matt in the murder. Well, as it turned out, Matt was innocent, but Amy was not. She turned out to be the murderer of her former husband, whom Matt knew nothing about, but since Amy had been dead for six years at this point, she didn’t have to answer for her crime.

  Once again I jumped ahead to 1980 for my next installment, Sgt. Cooper’s Lonely Hearts Club Frame. Matt is now sixty-nine years old and somewhat lonely so he joins a lonely hearts club and meets a woman, who turns up dead the next day. Matt was the last person to see her alive and becomes a suspect. All this time, his grown son, Clay is running the P.I. business.

  Sometimes I get my inspiration from the newspaper headlines. I had read somewhere that in various parts of the country, police were being summoned to 9-1-1 calls that turned out to be nothing more than an excuse to lure cops into a trap, where they’d be killed. I took that idea and ran with it in the next Cooper mystery, The Clay Cooper Cop Killer Caper. Have a few drinks and try saying that three times in a row. I had fun writing that one because I could kill off the cop killers at the end and I’d be relatively sure that the readers woul
d be sitting there thinking, ‘That’s what you get, and I hope you died a slow, agonizing death, you scumbags’. Well, if they didn’t, at least I did. What can I say? I have to take my kicks where I can find them.

  When I reflected on my Cooper story, Sgt. Cooper’s Lonely Hearts Club Frame I got to thinking that maybe I could incorporate some of my vast Beatle trivia knowledge into a Cooper story. Readers may have noticed from reading Cooper Generations that Matt Cooper’s birthday was July 17, 1911. I did that on purpose so I could remember it later. My own birthday is July 17, 1950. That also came in handy when I introduced the birth of Matt’s son, Clay, who would be born July 5, 1950. That way, he’d be the same age as me and I could insert my thoughts and feelings into Clay Cooper.

  That being said, the next logical step was to have Sergeant Dan Hollister also have a son around Clay’s age. Only difference between them is that Matt eats up Beatle trivia, while Dean Hollister doesn’t care about music. With that in mind, when the now sergeant of the L.A. police department, Dean Hollister comes upon murder victims each having notes pinned to their bare bodies, I created a situation where Clay gets to view five notes side by side. While Dean sees no connection between the five, Clay immediately sees that each of the notes begins with the title of a Beatle song, and he tells Dean this.

  Since Dean is clueless when it comes to music and since Clay is somewhat of a Beatle expert, it’s only natural that Dean would call on Clay to assist him in the case. Now that I had that premise established, I set about trying to incorporate as many Beatle song titles as I could into this story. And my favorite entry in the whole story is the very last line at the end.

  A week or two passed after I wrote the Beatlemaniac story. My wife was telling some friends about my forty Cooper stories and how fans had already downloaded more than 110,000 copies, mostly for Cooper. The guy she told this to said something along the lines of, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to go back to Matt Cooper’s beginnings and see how it all came about?”