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Gigi Little, author of Who Killed One the Gun? Photo: Stephen O\u2019Donnell<\/p>\nGigi Little, author of Who Killed One the Gun? Photo: Stephen O\u2019Donnell<\/p>\n
Portland writer Gigi Little<\/a> is pulling something of a numbers racket in her new novel Who Killed One the Gun?<\/a> \u2014 which, no matter how nefarious those suspicious numbers might sound, isn\u2019t a bad thing at all.<\/p>\n To quote Herman\u2019s Hermits\u2019 1965 pop hit I\u2019m Henry the Eighth, I Am (another numerically insistent work), One the Gun includes nary a Willy or a Sam: Almost all of the book\u2019s characters carry numbers in their names, beginning with One the Gun himself, a run-of-the-mill private eye who\u2019s something of a cross between a would-be Sam Spade and one of Albert Einstein\u2019s loops in time.<\/p>\n Over the novel\u2019s 288 pages Gun runs into the likes of Zero the Hero, Two the True Blue, Four the Door, Five the No Longer Alive, Six the Kicks, Seven Heaven, Eight the First Mate, and Ten the When. Oh: and, the surprising Waitress with the Doe Eyes, who has dreams of becoming a lawyer.<\/p>\n Why a lawyer? Because there are cases that need to be solved and taken to trial. And One the Gun, as it turns out, is dead, at least in some version of reality that seems on hold because of the time warp: shot to death late in the never-ending day by some unknown person whose identity the dead\/not dead Gun is determined to discover, even as he pursues the identity of whoever killed Five the No Longer Alive.<\/p>\n And exactly how, if he\u2019s dead, is he going to do that? Well, it\u2019s about that loop in time. Every night, Gun\u2019s adventures end. And every morning he wakes up to the same day he\u2019d just finished \u2014 except that he (and one other person, as it turns out) realizes the same old day has started yet again. While everyone else is entering the new day as something fresh, Gun knows that time is on repeat, and he can remember everything that happened in the today that was yesterday, and for today-yesterdays stretching out before that. The question is: Can he alter his own actions so that he can change the past, and therefore also alter the future?<\/p>\n As confusing as this may sound, in the actual reading of the book it\u2019s not. Little, who is also staff cover designer for Portland\u2019s Forest Avenue Press<\/a> (which is the publisher of Who Killed One the Gun?), editor of the fiction anthology City of Weird: 30 Otherworldly Portland Tales<\/a>, and marketing coordinator for Powell\u2019s Books, keeps the story moving briskly forward \u2014 quite a feat considering that in the novel time itself keeps lurching back and forth, unpinned from forward motion. She tells her tale in a happily tongue-in-cheek manner, having sly fun with the conventions of the traditional detective novel and giving it an arm twist or three. Little was also a circus clown for 15 years, and a welcome dollop of that slightly absurdist take on everyday reality suffuses the novel.<\/p>\n A lot of the action takes place in a dive bar with a backroom gambling den habituated by, among others, the local preacher, who may not be quite as heavenly as he puts on. Little tosses in a dash of longed-for romance, too: Gun pines for his loyal assistant, Two the True Blue, who unfortunately for Gun is keeping company with the slightly truculent Three the Goatee. <\/p>\n Sponsor<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/1759419612_682_Who-Killed-One-the-Gun-front-cover.jpeg\")
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