Episode 44 - Small Town Cop/Big City Crimes {A Man, His Dogs and a Badge} by Darrell Day

Terrible Book Club

Don't be fooled! Darrel Day didn't write this - or even edit it, apparently - he just put it on the internet for his friend, Terry Bandemer. Which is fine! It's nice to help your friend put out their book - but why put your name on it as the author when you didn't write it?

This is Terry's autobiography. It's generic non-fiction; just a look at a random man's life as a K9 officer in Minnesota between the 1960s-2000s. It's written in first person perspective and would be fine if Terry had gotten a real editor and had consulted a second person to assist with writing. Unfortunately he didn't do either of those things.

This book should never have been published as it is. It's stream-of-consciousness brainstorming at best, with lists of names, incoherent sentence structures, lots of spelling errors, and no sense of chronology or order.

We had to make a spreadsheet just to keep track of all of the people/dogs mentioned in this book. It's a little over 350 pages with about 200 named individuals (this isn't including all of the additional unnamed people).

If Terry had partnered with someone with more experience writing and had gotten a good editor, they could honestly probably have crafted the basic facts of Terry's life into a procedural K9 cop drama or comedy for Netflix or Amazon.

As it is now, though, the pieces are there, but none of them fit together.