Paul Merrill Brings Comedy to 'Fast Food Detective'

In Paul Merrill’s first book, Fast Food Detective: An Offbeat Novel, he writes “a detective-comedy-romance spoof on men and women’s relationships.” The story is about Larry, a hapless assistant manager at a fast food restaurant, who loses his job and then tries unsuccessfully at getting any future jobs in the industry. From there, he decides to pursue his childhood dream of becoming a detective but has no luck finding any clients, until one day, he receives a mysterious call from a man who wants to hire him. As it turns out, this person is the “richest man in the world” and tasks Larry with destroying his ex-wife, who is the head of the National Organization of Organized Women. From there, adventures ensue and as the title states, “the truth about men and women [is] exposed.”

For Merrill, the road to completing this novel was not without its challenges. He explains how he went from setting a goal of finishing Fast Food Detective in three months to finally completing it after 32 years. Throughout that time, he faced many stumbling blocks and criticisms that took him back to years of rewrites and revisions, at one point even putting it aside before returning to it five years later. One of his motivations for finally finishing the book came from a famous DaVinci quote that said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

For his next project, Merrill, who resides in Mexico and is studying to be a pilates and yoga instructor, is working on a yoga book teaching readers about basic and self-created yoga techniques that he uses in his morning and evening routines. He also has two more novels in the works, a romantic comedy and a drama. What will he do differently this time around? “I’ll write it in six months! I won’t put adjectives and adverbs…well actually I will…So I’ll write it and there will be tons of adjectives and adverbs in it but I know now about how to clean it up and I also know about character strength and that kind of stuff.”