The other lead of Dawn and Dusk Investigations is Inspector Dusk. He’s first introduced rather distantly, not wanting anything to do with Desmond. But he soon comes into focus, bringing with him the series’ mythology.
He’s effortlessly mysterious telling Desmond in their first meeting, that he will never explain his plans and that Desmond should just do his best to keep up. From then on it can safely be said that everything Dusk does is second-guessed.
Dismissively referring to Desmond as his ‘assistant’, Dusk shows off the typical aloofness and arrogance you’d expect from a detective. However as things progress he begrudgingly admits that Desmond isn’t a complete moron and that he may have a few ‘clever hunches’ every now and then.
A large amount of his knowledge on the immortals, and his intellect in general, comes from the fact that he is one of them. Stemming from this is his pathological fear of the past. Everything in his house is constantly being updated. He never eats food more than a few days old. His television is always switched to the twenty-four hour news channels. He won’t step foot in a museum and will punch anyone who asks about his personal history.
In part this is because he suffers from amnesia, not remembering anything before the moment he became immortal. He actively fears remembering his past because, as he himself puts it:
“The Enigma Killer picks the best of history’s monsters. I’ve been at this job a long time now, so tell me: How many people did I kill? What atrocities did I commit? What could I have possibly done that warranted my immortality? Something tells me, I’m not the exception – I’m the rule.”
Dusk has been one of my most troubling characters, taking the longest to form. When I started Dawn and Dusk Investigations I knew little more than ‘he’s clever’. It took a heck of a long time to define any kind of personality, to make him more than a just a brain. The fear of the past helped to some degree, giving me a wealth of scenarios to play on.
What took just as long was figuring out how he’d look. For an alarming length of time, he became an old, bearded man who wore a hat. Part of me thought this was somewhat unique, but I eventually realised that it wasn’t.
From there I eventually reverted him back to the original image I had, a younger man with black hair, who wore chequered shirts.
His thought process is very shrewd, as I said, never expect to know what he’s thinking until the moment is right. He’s not quite Sherlock Holmes, noticing every detail of the scene around him, in fact as per detective tradition he goes on to insult the famous detective, saying:
“Sherlock Holmes is an idiot. He spends too much time noticing everything when if he was a competent detective he’d only notice the important things.”
Whilst Dusk does find things others may overlook, his work is usually more focussed on ‘the bigger picture’, along with using his cleverness to mask his responses from both the enemy and the audience.
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