Archive Spotlight: The Silent Fox

Photo Credit to Mom - 2020

(Thanks, Mom!)

I wrote about a dozen short stories over my high school career. Only two of them have been posted to this website as an official short story: “The Toll of Thunder” and “The Messenger”. It’s interesting to consider they were both outliers compared to the other pieces.

In high school, I mainly wrote humorous pieces, or at least I tried to. A lot of the jokes were meant to parody media I was really into at the time. Stuff like Marvel, the Mission: Impossible series, and Percy Jackson. It’s the main reason I’ve kept these in the Archive; the humor in them hasn’t aged too well.

Nowadays, I know that a good parody or satire piece is at its best when an author really knows the genre they’re spoofing. It’s clear to me now that I didn’t know enough about the noir genre to pull off The Silent Fox.

Funnily enough, it made it really hard to tell if The Silent Fox was satire or not. Which, just to be clear, it is. It’s supposed to be silly and campy and full of silliness. But because the only knowledge of noir I had was the Tracer Bullet character from “Calvin and Hobbes”, it basically meant I was satirizing other satire. It just doesn’t work. I consider it to be the main flaw of the piece. It’s not funny enough to be satire and not serious enough to be considered a good mystery-noir fiction.

Let’s back up a little bit, shall we? Because to unravel the mystery of The Silent Fox, you first need to understand my siblings.

I’m the oldest of three. My sister is two years younger than me and my brother is seven and a half years younger. With two parents working full time, I was often tasked with entertaining or babysitting my siblings until they got home, but this was a task I’d look forward to. Not only was it a chance for me to take on more responsibility, I’ve always had a love for making up games, stories, and adventures with my siblings. Looking back, it makes sense that I’d find a love for Dungeons and Dragons and other TTRPGs a few years later.

So The Silent Fox was one of many inside jokes between us. It started as a way to jokingly keep my brother in line when he’d goof off. I’d tell him stuff like “The Silent Fox is always watching” and he’d jokingly pretend to behave, which was at least a step in the right direction. It was probably spawned from stuff from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, with secret societies and mysterious names.

Eventually, this Silent Fox stuff morphed into the old spy games my siblings would play with each other in elementary school. Stuff like trying to sneak downstairs and steal something off of our parents’ desks without them noticing. Or buying cheap SpyGear toys from Target and thinking we were cool for owning “Night Vision Goggles” and “Laser Tripwire Kits”.

We’d start joking about how we’d eventually infiltrate this Silent Fox organization and restore justice to our city! I’d be Agent Wolf, my brother would be Agent S or SF (for Starfish), and my sister (who was admittedly less enthusiastic about the whole thing) was the legendary detective The Observer.

Thus, a story spawned from a silly inside joke. We’d make up stuff inspired by SHIELD and Hydra from Marvel, or the Men in Black series, or Mission: Impossible.

It soon begged the question: What exactly were we trying to achieve? How had The Silent Fox wronged us? Every good story needed motivation.

This is where things get a little… sillier.

My favorite candy is Sour Patch Kids. And I’ve always liked a good running joke or bit. This particular bit started in about eighth grade when, for my birthday, I received about twenty or so boxes of Sour Patch Kids. I didn’t know what to do with all of them. So I’d have a stash hidden away in a kitchen cabinet which I’d dip into when I’d want a sweet treat.

It’s still unclear to me how this happened, but The Silent Fox bit and the Sour Patch Kids bit somehow merged. Agent Wolf, Agent SF, and The Observer would need a McGuffin to steal back from The Silent Fox: the SPK’s, Wolf’s prized possession and life’s work. They’d stolen them from him, and he’d have his revenge.

I’d planned to reveal in a later episode what the SPK’s actually were. Looking at the story now, I’m not convinced this would have been a good reveal. The actual story isn’t funny enough to have a plot twist like this. But honestly, I’d just get a kick out of Wolf’s angsty dialogue about how much the SPK’s meant to him. The bit, it seems, went so far that only I found it funny. And my siblings, of course.

The actual prose of the two episodes I actually managed to write weren’t anything special. I even knew it at the time, which is the main reason I never continued the series. They were very dialogue heavy, with most of it being the type of quips people make fun of Marvel for having. Most of the dialogue wasn’t even punctuated correctly.

The story itself was pretty basic. It’s pretty clear I was making things up as I went. When I write longform projects now, especially serialized prose, I always make sure to at least have some sort of plan in mind before I start writing.

But despite all of its flaws, The Silent Fox is still some of the most fun stuff I think I’ve written. I’ve explored the noir genre a lot more in recent years, putting my own spin on it, and it’s cool to think that one of my first short stories was rooted in the genre. My sister and I are still fans of it today.

Most of all, the story reminds me of my siblings.

It reminds me of all the silly memories we’d share and inside jokes we’d tell. It reminds me of why I write in the first place. I write to entertain not only other people but also myself. After deciding to pursue writing as a career, I’d often have to remind myself of this. I love doing it. I want to continue to love doing it.

So even if this whole “professional writing career” doesn’t pan out, it’s nice knowing I’ve still got stories to hold onto--even if they’re silly, convoluted stories kept between my siblings and I.

Read the story here!