Idea:
When this popped up on my Pinterest, I had just seen
the Eurovision Song Contest. The winner was Conchita Wurst. The latest tv series
I watched was Miss Fisher Investigates, and right before that Firefly.
So - I'm a singing cross-dressing lady sleuth in Firefly world. Huh. I
kind of like that.
I know painfully little about ANYTHING associated to this!
I don't know how to write mysteries, so I'll research that.
Writing a Mystery Novel - 7 Elements Your Story Needs
Notes from "The Agatha Christie Code"
Essential elements of a mystery story
So... the characters... the sleuth, of course. Miss Firefly. He is not a transwoman, he is a crossdresser. Or... maybe in future that is not a thing. I mean, it's a man who likes dressing up in beautiful dresses, jewelry, make-up and likes having his hair pretty. Maybe in the future people have stopped assigning gender to clothes.
The setting - Firefly world. Now, the Firefly is about the ship, but I would set my lady sleuth on a city on some planet, like New Melbourne?
I know nothing about Australia. So, maybe not New Melbourne. Just a random space city, somewhat placed in Firefly universe.
Firefly is a space Western - everything is sort of set in 19th century "wild west", even cities, though... this is Persephone City...
I suppose I don't much need to care about that. Just set it in a futuristic city with Wild West influences.
So... how can I show it's Firefly universe without it being that, because I don't have the right to use that world? If I wrote Firefly fan fiction, it would have the characters from Firefly. I could do that, and then change enough details to make them "not theft"... though it would be that anyway. *I* would know it's a theft. I would need to remove it at least twice. Also because I really like Firefly and the characters.
With "twice removed" I mean, that miss Firefly cannot know any of the characters, cannot meet any of them, but could know someone who does. Like Kaylee's sister's friend, or doing business with someone who has done business with Malcolm, knows an old soldier, something like that.
Now, this isn't that important. I can change the setting to something I like better, that's easier to write about, that supports my story, but so far this is what we work with.
So, every mystery works the same, despite of setting and characters.
There is a crime, and then the crime is being solved. The reader is solving the crime together with the detective, and the author gives all these clues and red herrings and tries to make it interesting...
Hmm... what would be an interesting crime for our lady detective to solve? I could make it easy for me and rewrite an Agatha Christie... instead of Hercule Poirot, we have our Curtisanne Luciole.
How will a transvestite heroine change the things? I would like the world to have evolved so that people don't care what other people are wearing, and in fact the transvestite heroine would have no what so ever effect on anything. I suppose it would be mostly because they prefer using high heels and it's not quite functional and practical always... and skirts and long hair and all that. Women's glamorous clothing isn't meant for anything but looking glamorous. So... stopping to curse her shoes, hitching up the skirt to be able to climb over a fence, and so on.
Miss Fisher was supposed to be very interested in fashion, but she was wearing pants most of the time. Miss Luciole could be using their "vanity" as a disguise and distraction. If you correct your makeup all the time, no-one notices that you are using the mirror to see what happens behind your back. And if you are a ditzy blonde, people won't take you seriously.
So... I took a couple of old mysteries, and here's my thoughts about the plot.
- Mika Waltari: Who Killed Mrs. Skrof? (1939)
- Agatha Christie: Flock of Geryon (1939-42?)
- G. K. Chesterton: The Eye of Apollo (1911)
- Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body? (1923)
the victim: an old religious woman, a bitch, she lives with a grand-daughter, who is really badly beaten, forced to live ascetically. The old woman is rich and owns a rental house, and lives in the highest floor. Nobody lives in the floor below her, because she wants privacy.
At the night she dies, the grand-daughter is not home.
The home is very minimally decorated, but there are some very expensive artwork on the walls and some expensive sculptures and such. A few, very few.
The apartment is very clean, the sculptures have left spots on the surface after dusting.
The bitch is a combination of Carrie's mother and Mother Dearest.
She has a nephew, the last living relative (not the grand-daughter, she is a girl and our bitch is misogynist. God made women to make babies.) She thinks family is important, so she leaves her riches to her nephew and grand-daughter IF they get married. If not, everything goes to the religious cult.
That's sort of the Father Brown story with the sun cult person.
That person is charismatic but like dough. With cold, dead fish hands. Cold, blue eyes. No sense of humor.
He has moved to the apartment house and visits the old lady often. The girl is not often home, she goes to school, and when she comes home, she basically closes herself in her room to study.
Flock of Geryon? (Agatha Christie: Labours of Hercules)
Now, the grand-daughter and nephew aren't that far apart in age. He is
just a couple of years older than she is. The old witch's sister was
almost 20 years younger than she was, about the same age as the old
witch's son, the father of the girl.
The nephew is an artist, perhaps even a drag queen, and lives with someone else... miss Firefly? This could be how she gets involved...
Lets make it into a closed room mystery... How? I need to somehow limit the suspects into the people who live in the house. What if the doors are locked during the night, what if everyone entering is registered into a computer, what if there are bars in front of the windows, that can be opened only by a special key, for cleaning, so no-one can enter or exit through the windows without the key? What about balconies? What if the city is so dirty no-one uses balconies in the city?
Let's say the granddaughter has one of these window keys, because she isn't only the student, she is also her grandmother's housekeeper, and responsible for cleaning the windows, and she sneaks out at night to meet her beau. She doesn't want to marry the nephew.
Let's say the nephew is the murderer, and he tried to murder everyone in the apartment, both the old lady and the girl, to inherit the old witch's money. He didn't know the girl wasn't in the apartment, because the door was closed and she hadn't left the room through it, and he didn't know she had the key to the window.
Let's say that he was visiting his aunt at evening, and left the gas on, when he left the apartment. The old lady didn't notice anything, and died, and the girl was gone and then slept with window open, so she didn't get as much gas, and survived. I need to check if that theory works.
The red herring is the cult leader. I need to put in enough evidence to incriminate him. Maybe he even planned killing her. Maybe he even did something to kill her, like give her something poisoned, but she didn't eat it, because stoicism or something.
Maybe someone else ate it and was killed? That would be another red herring. Who?
What if the nephew took the delicious thing with him, not wanting it to go to waste, and that's how he's caught.
So... my biggest problem is the writing. I'm really good at ideas and developing and planning and all this, but writing itself... *sigh*
So, I'll just take the beginning of the Lord Peter Whimsey novel, and run with it. Because it fits.
CHAPTER I
“OH, DAMN!” SAID LORD Peter Wimsey at Piccadilly Circus.
“Hi, driver!”
The taxi man, irritated at receiving this appeal while negotiating the intricacies of turning into Lower Regent Street across the route of a 19 ’bus, a 38-B and a bicycle, bent an unwilling ear.
“I’ve left the catalogue behind,” said Lord Peter deprecatingly. “Uncommonly careless of me. D’you mind puttin’ back to where we came from?”
“To the Savile Club, sir?”
“No—110 Piccadilly—just beyond—thank you.”
“Thought you was in a hurry,” said the man, overcome with a sense of injury.
“I’m afraid it’s an awkward place to turn in,” said Lord Peter, answering the thought rather than the words. His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola. The taxi, under the severe eye of a policeman, revolved by slow jerks, with a noise like the grinding of teeth.
The block of new, perfect and expensive flats in which Lord Peter dwelt upon the second floor, stood directly opposite the Green Park, in a spot for many years
occupied by the skeleton of a frustrate commercial enterprise.
Our lady Firefly sits in the taxi on their way somewhere, they have their arms full of things, like wigs, and bags and shoes and clothes and things, and they go through them the last time in the taxi, and notices that something is missing. So she tells the taxi driver to turn around and go back so that they can get what they forgot.
