“Renaldo!”  I wrote this story in the 7th or 8th grade.  It was my attempt at an organized crime thriller.

The story has everything!!  Ziti!!  Cocaine!!  A main character whose name is “Scab!!”  Famous cops who go by a single name — like Madonna or Prince or something!!  The phrase “genius detective, pride of the police force!!”  Possibly a degree of confusion about when the Great Depression occurred!!  (I chose to set the story in the 1920’s, for some reason, and confusingly stated that “jobs were scarce” at the time.  Hey — I’ve told you people before that I was never the smartest kid in the class.)

Anyway, enjoy (?) this antique Nolan prose.  Thanks once again to Carrie Schor for passing along vintage stuff from the Longwood Central School District in New York.

Postscript: admit it — you saw the headline “7th-grade crime story” and thought this would be about me committing a crime in the 7th grade, didn’t you?  But I gotta find out about a couple of statutes of limitations before I write about those.