Hypertext Magazine asked Darrin Doyle, author of The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions, “What exactly is a Big Baby Crime Spree?”
By Darrin Doyle
The narrator of the story “The Big Baby Crime Spree” is a custodian named Travis. He works at a hospital, and his father is suffering at home in the late stages of Alzheimer’s. Travis desperately wants to help his father and wishes he could afford to move his father into a facility where he could receive professional care. The story’s title refers to Travis’s elaborate and bizarre plan for stealing babies from the maternity ward and using them to commit crimes because he believes that newborns younger than six months of age don’t have fully developed fingerprints. He wants to train them to steal money for him.
Of course, his scheme is ridiculous and impossible and based on questionable science, but Travis has faith. It’s the unyielding faith in his own delusions, in fact, that keeps him going. He’s been planning the Big Baby Crime Spree for months. He has filled notebooks with meticulous plans and contingencies, waiting for the right number of pregnant women scheduled to deliver at the same time.
When Travis meets Rhonda, the “PNNFP” (Pretty New Nurse From Pediatrics), he realizes that he wants a partner for his crime. Rhonda is an outcast like Travis and is prone to her own fantasies and obsessions (she loves John Lennon to an unhealthy degree.) The two outcasts bond until their mutual madness threatens to ruin both of their lives. On one level, the story is absurd, outlandish, and comedic but at its core it’s about using our willed delusions as a bulwark against the harshness of reality.
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Darrin Doyle teaches at Central Michigan University. The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions is his fifth book of fiction. He’s the author of the story collections Scoundrels Among Us and The Dark Will End the Dark (Tortoise Books) and the novels The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo (St. Martin’s Press) and Revenge of the Teacher’s Pet:A Love Story (LSU Press). He lives in Mount Pleasant, Michigan with three other humans and a cat. His website is darrindoyle.com.
