Harland Quinn
Harland Quinn
"When every other guy has sent you away and even old Tom Lowry’s laughed you out of his office, my place is your last stop on the way down the drain."
Harland Quinn is a man with a past - one he doesn't like to talk about.
He showed up in town a couple of years back, with a small roll of notes and the need for a little obscurity, a need that saw him picking out an office in the worst part of town within each reach of a liquor store. The private detective sign out front is as much smokescreen as advertisement, since the only clients he gets are the desperate, the lost, the hopeless... and now something else entirely.
The rumours flew, of course - they still do. Some people suggest he absconded with the church funds, others think he ran off with a Senator's wife. Some people even like to think he killed a man. Whatever the truth might be, Quinn's not telling - but none of those ideas explain the strange books he keeps in his office...
All the locals know for sure about Quinn is his taste for hard liquour and that there usually seems to be a woman somewhere in his orbit. His secretary Dolores for starters - even if she's too smart to let anything happen between them, she still buys his lines and sticks around in the face of uncertain hours and a paycheque best described as "Sporadic."
Then there's Millie, the torch-carrying waitress at Quinn's favourite hangout. To him she's just a good kid, best kept out of trouble, but to her... well, that moody air of mystery works wonders on a small-town girl come up to the city.
And on top of that there's Millie's boss, Ceejay. If anything happened there neither of them is talking about it, but she still keeps Quinn about, despite the heavy drinking and the occasional fight.
So when a new batch of trouble walks into Quinn's office with a pretty face and the promise of easy money... Well, what else was going to happen?