Manchild at Play: LEGO Detective’s Office
I tend to make a rule towards LEGO, in that I’m not to buy any unless it’s very, very necessary. You could argue that no LEGO is necessary, but then you don’t own LEGO minifigs of the Ghostbusters, Doc Brown and Marty and the Joker, so shut up.
Aside from LEGO and Batman, I have a huge dollop of fandom reserved for the writing of Raymond Chandler and his eternally sardonic1 detective, Philip Marlowe. It’s a fascination that began when I first encountered Lewton’s sarcastic wit in Discworld Noir, and was later nurtured by the absolutely brilliant BBC radio adaptation of the Marlowe stories from the 70’s starring Ed Bishop (the voice of Captain Blue in Captain Scarlet). Ed Bishop will always be the voice of Marlowe for me, his is the voice I hear when I read the books2.
LEGO recently decided to release a detective’s office. It even has his name painted on the glass.
Funny story3: it cost twice as much to buy the 2000+ bricks set from Amazon than buying directly from the LEGO store. You know, based in Denmark. So I put the order in, and watched the order be processed like a hawk. There was one thing that caught my eye when the package arrived in the country, but I didn’t pay it much concern.
I eagerly awaited the delivery on the day it was due to arrive. Around half eleven, I checked the delivery status…
Except I didn’t have the delivery. I realised that the address on the postal tracker was a truncated version of my address, in that it didn’t have the flat number.
I rang the delivery company, gave my name and the tracking number. When asked for the first line of my address, I gave the specific flat number and house number. The operator calmly explained that it wasn’t the address he had on record and as such could not help me any further as I had not provided the address he had on file. This was ridiculous, the operator couldn’t help me find my package because I was giving the correct address. They suggested getting in touch with the supplier, and I had visions of attempting to get in touch with customer services in Denmark.
I admit heading out into the street with the briefest of intentions to knock door-to-door. “Hello, do you have a big box of LEGO? It’s mine, I’m afraid.” Instead, I had an idea and rang the delivery company again.
Thankfully, I was put through to a different operator. I gave my name and reference number but this time I gave the vaguest address possible, just the house number.
“It’s been signed for,” the operator explained, giving me an unfamiliar name.
“No one with that name here,” I replied.
The operator read out the full address, and I laughed. It had been delivered to a flat number the same as my house number across the street. We receive their mail occasionally! The operator began to panic as I explained this as the calls are recorded and he’d just given out someone else’s address. I thanked him, wished him a good day and headed across the road, where it turns out a quiet chap’s girlfriend had signed for the parcel and left it in the lobby to collect. I felt overly pleased with myself for the bit of trickery, and my girlfriend described it as an act “Marlowe would be proud of”.
The build of the office took about three or four days to complete, in build sessions of three of four hours a day. It is amazingly detailed and I’m chuffed to bits with it, it is really cool.
Below are images from the build, click on them to expand the image bigger.
- Don’t worry, I had to look it up too. ↩
- The BBC recently produced a full series of new Marlowe adaptations starring Toby Stephens (a.k.a. Gustav Graves – the smuggest man in the world – from Die Another Day). They are alright, but it’s still a British bloke doing an American accent and he plays it far to gruffly and to stereotype in my opinion. ↩
- In retrospect, at the time it was f*cking terrifying. I guess you could say I was shitting bricks, if you wanted to use an appropriate pun considering what was being delivered. ↩
Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | March 29, 2015 at 5:19 pm | LEGO, Manchild at Play (Toys) | No comment
Tags: detectives, Discworld Noir, LEGO, Philip Marlowe, private investigators, Raymond Chandler