An Excerpt from the Future ‘Detective Grigoris’ Novel by Christopher Deliso

Earlier in 2024, I released this short excerpt from Chapter 2 of my upcoming ‘Detective Grigoris’ novel I’ve been writing since 2021, on my Substack TLS newsletter. The first draft of the entire book was finished on 26 January 2024, and the second draft is scheduled to be completed before the end of April 2024.

 

Although just a brief taste of the book to come, the excerpt gives a sense of the style. For more information on the general context of the book, see this website’s Detective Grigoris page here. The book has risen in length from the first draft to the second, and is presently in the vicinity of 200,000 words. We’ll see how it all shakes out when final revisions are done.

 

Without giving away too much about the plot, I’ll just say for now that this first book (out of a projected six) takes place around the year 2000, and concerns the first interwoven ‘cases’ of a young Greek detective, Grigoris, who comes from a usual-but-unusual family background and is the grandson of an Orthodox priest. The narrative follows his travels throughout Greece and nearby countries to solve a series of cases that are, while not Herculean, sometimes do take on the aspect of thankless labors.

 

Previous to this, I’d never considered writing a book or even story in the detective-fiction genre, as it hadn’t occurred to me during my three decades of writing as being necessary. As with everything I write, I determined that if I was to do so, it would have to be new and different in some way than previous works.

 

Of course, the extent to which I have succeeded or failed in this direction will ultimately be left up to future readers to decide. but I can say that the last almost three years has been a wonderful learning experience, during which I’ve achieved some of the most inspired and best writing of my life. I very much am looking forward to sharing it with readers once a good publishing deal is arranged. It has seemed difficult at times, and often I doubted I would even get to this stage of completing the manuscript. But the fact that I have does seem to indicate a providential power at work. The novel is a good one, and filled with comic touches and moments of beauty and excitement. I look forward to sharing it with my readers soon.