Someone help me finish this story!

Cafe Society
1

I’ve had a story rattling around in my head for the past…well it feels like forever, so I’m going to go with that. I know what happens at every part of the story; the only challenges have been how to write some of the happenings, and what happens to make some events transpire.

I’m rewriting it for the umpteenth time, and for the first time I’m being faced with trying to write the ending…and this is one of those bits where I know what happens, just not how.

The story ends with a detective being framed for the murder of a woman whose death he’s in the process of investigating. The entire story takes place inside of an apartment, so I’d prefer the detective’s downfall to take place there. Either some police run in to apprehend him over some newly discovered something another, or he looks a little bit too hard in some nook or cranny and ends up making things look bad for himself as a result.

Or maybe he becomes poisoned by some trap and wakes up to discover himself in cuffs. How? I have no idea. But the story needs to end with him being framed. Worse case scenario, I can’t find a satisfying way of making this happen and I end the story with her killing him with a booby trap. It would serve much the same purpose, but not entirely.

I know why she does it, just not how, damnit.

I’d prefer something clever, simple, and easy to understand as opposed to something complicated and technical. As for the time period the story takes place in, there’s a mention of a laptop, but I may remove that later. Other than that technological reference, the time period isn’t defined too well. Sometime within the past 100 years, America.

I’m not getting any where from this. Any idea people feel like lending a helping hand here?

2

Having everything happen in the apartment is a pretty serious constraint. I take it that’s where the woman died/is presumed to have died?

The first thing that occurs to me is to key it on the detective taking a piece of physical evidence–either taking it out of the apartment with him, or just pocketing it in the apartment. This would be something the police overlooked (accidentally-wasn’t-it?), or it could be something planted after the scene had already been examined. The evidence in question could cast suspicion on the detective either by simple possession, or because it’s something a murderer would clearly want to remove from the scene. A murder weapon would be a classic example, but you’ll need a plausible reason for the detective to be stupid enough to take it. Perhaps it’s actually something that belongs to him, stolen and planted for just this purpose?

Once you’ve got the evidence in place, all you need is to tip off the standard-issue “I don’t trust PIs” cop.

3

It all takes place in the same apartment, eh? What’s the time frame like? Can people leave the apartment? Who lives there? What’s the antagonist’s connection to the apartment? To the victim? How come the detective’s on the case? Is it directly related to the murder or only tangentially related? What’s the murder weapon? Do we know?

I guess what I’m saying is I’d like to read the story to help you out, but I’d understand if you didn’t want anyone looking at it yet.

Two scenarios popped into my head:

  1. The detective finds the murder weapon, and it’s a hypodermic needle (50 units/.5 CC – they’re about four inches long and more narrow than a pencil) that was wedged behind the bedstead or behind the nightstand or whatever. He finds and is immediately interrupted, but instead of doing the sensible thing and putting it back where he found it, he pockets it. Things get hot, and he decides that it would probably be best to re-plant the evidence for the cops to find. He gets caught, the cops conveniently find the murder weapon on his person and covered in his fingerprints.

  2. He sneaks into the apartment at night with the stolen murder weapon (probably best if it’s a blunt instrument or a gun or something), and has a confrontation with the evil woman. She calls the cops and pulls a performance worthy of an Oscar, telling them to come quick, he’s threatening to kill her, he’s just confessed he killed the victim – and oh my god! he has the murder weapon! She finishes the phone call and very calmly coldcocks him with the receiver. She locks him in the room (assuming that’s possible), and when the cops get there, he’s bellowing and pounding at the door and calling her all sorts of foul words. Law & Order noise

4

Poisoned ice cubes - meant for the occupant of the apartment, but because of his larger body does not kill him but does put him down.

5

[QUOTE=Balance]
Having everything happen in the apartment is a pretty serious constraint. I take it that’s where the woman died/is presumed to have died?

[/QUOTE]

Yes, she’s found dead lying on her bed.

The important thing here is not that the detective is found guilty of killing her or that he appears to the cops that he killed her, but that the dead girl framed her death on whatever detective was going to be working on her murder case. It all stems from her, so having the detective pick up a murder weapon and carry it around doesn’t work unless she somehow gave him a reason to do that.

[QUOTE=Miss Purl McKnittington]
It all takes place in the same apartment, eh? What’s the time frame like? Can people leave the apartment? Who lives there? What’s the antagonist’s connection to the apartment? To the victim? How come the detective’s on the case? Is it directly related to the murder or only tangentially related? What’s the murder weapon? Do we know?

I guess what I’m saying is I’d like to read the story to help you out, but I’d understand if you didn’t want anyone looking at it yet.

[/QUOTE]

The story begins during the night and ends the next day around noonish. The setting is small and random crime free town in the middle of nowhere, America. As for the detective, he’s not a PI but rather a police detective left to his own devices for the solving of this case…if only for one night Why? Probably because all the other authorities were called away to tend to something urgent that requires a lot of bodies.

There is a bit being left out of the story, because I either mean for it to be ambiguous, or because it’s not relevant to what the story is really about anyways. What I’m working with here is a story about materialism, missed opportunity, and a realistic approach to the whole “love at first sight” thing. It’s not so much about a guy trying to solve the murder case of a young girl, so much as it is about a romantic detective falling in love with a girl who’s death he’s investigating as he goes through her personal belongings.

I personally don’t believe in “love at first sight” per se, but I do believe in a sort of instant recognition of a highly compatible personality. I think when a person achieves their potential they are in a position to meet someone they can get along with. Say for example, it’s your life’s dream to move to Colorado, get a good job that pays 45,000 a year, you love “Death Cab for Cutie”, your favorite food is Italian, you’re a night owl, and your favorite movie is The Rocky Horror Picture show.

Now picture yourself sitting in a middle class part of a Denver town, in a nice Italian cafe that stays open until 3am to catch the crowd leaving from the late night showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. An attractive member of the opposite sex rolls in wearing a “Death Cab for Cutie” t shirt, makes their order, and upon seeing you dressed up as a transvestite, smiles, as though you’re also an attractive member of the opposite sex.

I think a lot can be drawn from a moment like that. What I’m trying to convey here is something very much like that, only that the girl had to die to fulfill her potential, and the guy spends some amount of time wondering how else the two of them could have ever met unless she had been killed.

Think Philip Marlow falling in love with a dead Amelie (from the movie Amelie), who later turns out to be a post mortem femme fatal with a deadly come hither.

She is an artistic hermit with no identifying records and a great amount of wealth who chose to live in a ghetto. She has a closet full of journals, and her bedroom walls are caked with Post it Notes detailing every quirk and detail of her personality and thinking process.

He is a creepy, haggard, idealistic detective who may either be looking through the same closet 15 times because he’s obsessed with the victim, or because he feels like something might be missing. Hell, he actually may have even done her in. I’d like to keep that possibility open to interpretation, but no matter how the story is written it will have been her that frames him in my mind.

He’s a detective, she’s a mystery. Detective loves mystery. They also undo them, and she was as much a mystery in life as in death, so maybe there’s something to that. I’m reaching for a Creep Vs. Creep thing.

And while I’m willing to say that much and more, I’m not really comfortable sharing the story with anyone just yet. For my rough drafts I try to get all of the conceptual stuff out of the way and only later do I come in to make everything sound sensible and pretty. To answer the rest of the questions…

The story is only going to consist of the detective and the dead girl’s apartment until the ending of the story.

The murder weapon is not mentioned…The case is pretty much seen as hopeless from the get go. The girl has no identity, nothing was stolen from the apartment, she wasn’t raped, and she’s described as being “brutally slaughtered”. I’m thinking blunt instrument myself. But that’s all beside the point, because from where we meet the detective he is trying to get a feel for who the girl was so he might be able to derive some motive out of the whole mess. Some amounting of detecting has already been done. We’re meeting our character in the middle to end here.

6

Bump?

7

It sounds like other people have already gone over the scene. The fact that it’s known to start with that she wasn’t raped suggests that at least the forensics team has done their bit, and the body has been taken away and examined. That pretty much rules out dumping physical evidence on the detective as a way of framing him. You describe the woman as having no identity, so having some sort of fraudulent document trail pointing at the detective is probably out.

The only thing I can think of is for the woman to have stolen small but identifiable personal items from every detective that might investigate her death. (Really, this would work much better if she knew who the detective would be–maybe the place is small enough that he’s the only one who would be on duty?) The article or articles are planted around the scene for forensics to find. While the detective is nosing around the apartment, someone is going over the evidence for fingerprints, blood, hair, and such (prints are probably the best bet, since they can be matched relatively quickly) and finds a match for the detective on one of the items, apparently establishing his presence on the scene before or during the murder. Of course, if you have multiple detectives, they’d find hits for all of them, and you’d have to rely on sheer coincidence to hit the right one first, and have someone jump the gun a bit. It’s pretty flimsy evidence, but with nothing else to go on, they’d probably at least want to ask him about it.

8

Did the detective ever introduced himself to the victim? How obsessed is he over the victim? Did he end up doing something stalker-like before the victim’s death?

If it’s a “yes” to all of the above, I’m pretty sure there’d be notes of the detective on her journals and post-its - if her imagination is wild enough and the detective is creepy enough I’m sure she would include murder as one of the possible conjectures…

although that’d at best get the detective brought in for questioning, huh?

Oh well, there’s a reason I don’t write for a living… :frowning:

9

Wait, so the girl frames his murder, but is brutally murdered herself? She beat herself to death with a blunt object? Or someone else killed her, so she has an accomplice? A third person involved would significantly change your story, though.

I’m thinking drug/poison is your best bet - she may have been a regular user of heroin or something, but her last dose had something else that killed her. Then she might have planned ahead, sending/planting something at his home indicating that he had the poison in his home. She had been noticing him for a while, been taking notes, setting up this fantasy with him, knowing that he’s the kind of detective that will latch onto her death… so the post-its all over the wall have subtle messages about him (a typical hat, or something) and while he goes back every day to investigate, the other cops start to wonder why, and since “killers often go back to the scene of their crimes” (I have no clue if that’s actually true or not) your detective now looks suspicious. So they find the poison at his house (hidden where the girl hid it) and while he’s in the apartment ruminating on the crime, two other cops show up and “You’re under arrest for the murder of Mystery Girl” ::L&O music::

10

[QUOTE=Balance]

The only thing I can think of is for the woman to have stolen small but identifiable personal items from every detective that might investigate her death. (Really, this would work much better if she knew who the detective would be–maybe the place is small enough that he’s the only one who would be on duty?) The article or articles are planted around the scene for forensics to find. While the detective is nosing around the apartment, someone is going over the evidence for fingerprints, blood, hair, and such (prints are probably the best bet, since they can be matched relatively quickly) and finds a match for the detective on one of the items, apparently establishing his presence on the scene before or during the murder. Of course, if you have multiple detectives, they’d find hits for all of them, and you’d have to rely on sheer coincidence to hit the right one first, and have someone jump the gun a bit. It’s pretty flimsy evidence, but with nothing else to go on, they’d probably at least want to ask him about it.
[/QUOTE]

That could work really well, considering the town is supposed to be rather small. Of course she’s also supposed to live in a part of said small town with a lot of crime, so I’m not sure how that would work out…

I guess I’ll have to think about crime/population ratios to figure this out and see what would and wouldn’t be work.

Another thing you got me thinking about is whether or not the girl is rigging her apartment based on an effort based attraction, or an individual preference. The whole idea is that although she’s dead, she’s being discovered by someone who she would have greatly enjoyed sharing her life with, and then there’s the very strong suggestion that she meant for the two of them to be introduced like this. So is she into the “detective type”, and especially one that will work towards solving her death so hard ass to trigger her trap, or is there a particular detective she had in mind?

So far I’m leaning towards individual based, as it’s a better clincher for the “Creep Vs. Creep” thing I mentioned before. I would enjoy ending the story with the detective wondering how/why she got ahold of something that belonged to him after he had spend a number of pages obsessing over her every detail.

[QUOTE=jamus_se]
Did the detective ever introduced himself to the victim? How obsessed is he over the victim? Did he end up doing something stalker-like before the victim’s death?

If it’s a “yes” to all of the above, I’m pretty sure there’d be notes of the detective on her journals and post-its - if her imagination is wild enough and the detective is creepy enough I’m sure she would include murder as one of the possible conjectures…

although that’d at best get the detective brought in for questioning, huh?

Oh well, there’s a reason I don’t write for a living… :frowning:
[/QUOTE]

Nope, the departed and the detective have never met. At least not formally, if either was aware of the other at all.

How obsessed? Hmm..no real measuring system for that, is there? :wink:
I’m thinking I’m going to write the detective as being almost OCD with certain parts of her room. Going over the same thing over and over, slowly caressing the fabric on everything, taking care to notice the different scents from each room and closet, maybe putting some of her perfume onto himself…I’d like the detective to be recieved as a classical detective narrator, and then slowly grow uncomfortable with him. So obsessive enough to achieve that. But nothing too over the top.

If he did do anything stalker like, it will be a creation of the readers imagination. As I said before, I’d like to leave the possibility that the detective did kill her open. It will be his words when it’s noted that she had to die for her to reach her full potential, and it is that, and only that, that allowed their paths to cross. If she is a mystery, he largely helped to create her. And detective loves mystery.

(that that that that that that that)

She’d only keep notes if she knew someone had been watching her. And perhaps living as a hermit has drawn the attention of a few people in the past. If the detective had been a voyuer, he could have been grouped into all the others…though as a detective I’m thinking he’d be a bit better than most at survellance. Also, there’s always wire tapping, and I’m thinking she had an active online life as well.

And put the emoticon away. You’re all helping me sort out things a lot.

[QUOTE=mnemosyne]
Wait, so the girl frames his murder, but is brutally murdered herself? She beat herself to death with a blunt object? Or someone else killed her, so she has an accomplice? A third person involved would significantly change your story, though.

I’m thinking drug/poison is your best bet - she may have been a regular user of heroin or something, but her last dose had something else that killed her. Then she might have planned ahead, sending/planting something at his home indicating that he had the poison in his home. She had been noticing him for a while, been taking notes, setting up this fantasy with him, knowing that he’s the kind of detective that will latch onto her death… so the post-its all over the wall have subtle messages about him (a typical hat, or something) and while he goes back every day to investigate, the other cops start to wonder why, and since “killers often go back to the scene of their crimes” (I have no clue if that’s actually true or not) your detective now looks suspicious. So they find the poison at his house (hidden where the girl hid it) and while he’s in the apartment ruminating on the crime, two other cops show up and “You’re under arrest for the murder of Mystery Girl” ::L&O music::
[/QUOTE]

No no, The girl is murdered. Or rather appears to have been murdered. Cops are called in, look the scene over, the detective is called in, looks things over himself, and as time passes eventually the cops are called in to deal with another matter. The detective drops in again to look over the scene by himself and by the end of his trip is either killed by a trap set by the murder victim, or cops come charging in having discovered some evidence heavily suggesting the detective did it.

She set a trap for the detective before she died.

There’s going to be more questions than answers here, so the possibility of an accomplice means nothing. The murder victim is mystery personified. Our detective spends most of his time appreciating the questions rather than actually trying to solve them.

An OD would go against the persona of the girl I want to create. She’s dead, but she’s still a character with a personality. She has very strong ideas, beliefs, and values. Not the druggie type. She also has to be the kind of of girl our detective can fall in love with, and creepy though he may be, he is being modeled somewhat after the “Romantic White Knight Detective” archtype to some small extent. Again, their both very idealistic characters.

Hmm…poisen could work for the murder weapon, but I like the thought of a bloody death. There’s stronger connotations about what the detective might be capable of, and it makes the “victim” pausible suicide (assisted though it may be) much heavier.

I’m really leaning towards her acquiring something belonging to the detective. Something heavy and blunt maybe.

11

Mmm, still a lot to sort out it seems…

I still think it’d be hard for the girl to frame the detective if she doesn’t recognize him in one form or another - no formal meeting perhaps, but she should be aware of his presence.

In order for someone to be obsessed about another person I think there has to be some external or internal quality that can be obsessed about. Appearance is a common one, but in this case I imagine it is something deeper, some sort of quirk that makes her irresistible to him. Even if they don’t know each other, I think that quirk can make the two appear at the same place regularly. You mentioned the scene at the cafe after the nightly Rocky Horror Picture Show - what if it happens every night? The two might not exchange a word but that constance presence can drive people to imagine some pretty wild things.

A good detective on the job should be able to keep a certain level of professionalism when he’s on surveillance, but this is not exactly his day job, so he can afford to, or even choose to, get sloppy. He wants to gather every bit of information about her anonymously but at the same time he’ll want to be noticed. Because making direct contact for some reason is not logically sound, he’d drop hints - obscure and obvious ones, to get her to notice without him waving his arm going “look over here!”

He can then plant one of these objects to get himself noticed in her path. I know detectives don’t carry a baton regularly, but for my convenience let’s say he does, and he shows up to the cafe every night wearing it. The girl might not know this guy by name and they might not even greet each other when they run past each other, but she should be familiar enough to see the baton and know who owns it.

We can have the detective leave the baton deliberately at the table that she goes to every night and leave before she arrives. No notes or anything, to a stranger it might just looks like he left it there by accident… but she knows enough to recognize that he doesn’t usually sit there, that she usually does, and this deliberate act means something.

So there’s your murder weapon. The police finds her body in beaten to a bloody pulp with the baton conveniently discarded close by. Maybe the police lifted prints and it isn’t until the detective come back and left more prints (investigating the house) that the police found a match by accident.

Well, the theory is pretty sketchy and hardly bulletproof, and I’m sure there are circumstances that won’t work with your plot, but feel free to take it apart and grab anything that you like.

12

[QUOTE=jamus_se]
Mmm, still a lot to sort out it seems…

I still think it’d be hard for the girl to frame the detective if she doesn’t recognize him in one form or another - no formal meeting perhaps, but she should be aware of his presence.

In order for someone to be obsessed about another person I think there has to be some external or internal quality that can be obsessed about. Appearance is a common one, but in this case I imagine it is something deeper, some sort of quirk that makes her irresistible to him. Even if they don’t know each other, I think that quirk can make the two appear at the same place regularly. You mentioned the scene at the cafe after the nightly Rocky Horror Picture Show - what if it happens every night? The two might not exchange a word but that constance presence can drive people to imagine some pretty wild things.

A good detective on the job should be able to keep a certain level of professionalism when he’s on surveillance, but this is not exactly his day job, so he can afford to, or even choose to, get sloppy. He wants to gather every bit of information about her anonymously but at the same time he’ll want to be noticed. Because making direct contact for some reason is not logically sound, he’d drop hints - obscure and obvious ones, to get her to notice without him waving his arm going “look over here!”

[/QUOTE]

Right you are on your first point. Framing a detective for your death is a challenge. Framing any detective who investigates your death a little too much and then for me to explain her (assumed) motive through the firt person narraration of the detective who is also lamenting his inability to work his way out of his pickle is a pretty hefty challenge.

What about the girl leads the detective to obsession? Given that she’s a battered corpse in the morgue, it aint the looks. As I said before, part of the story is about materialism. I’m attempting to write the apartment as a preservation for the girl’s personality. The smell of her perfume whom she wore for no one else but herself hangs in the air, she has a collection of first edition books on a fine bookshelf and uses old theater tickets for bookmarks, her shelf in her closet is full of journals, her mind imprinted on her bedroom walls, and she has numerous pieces of artwork hanging around. So while he is falling in love with who she was, he’s also more or less falling in love with a bunch of objects. Which is essentialy what she did when she was alive. We’ve all done this to some extent. The girl in the story is more or less living through her possesions, so that even after she dies her absence creates an outline as vivid as that of a real person.

And then from this we go into the bit about detatchment. The detective serves society by putting people away into isolation, and he accomplishes this by hanging around crime scenes and studying things. Blood samples, Pieces of evidence A, B, and C, bullet, holes, shells, and broken furniture. He realizes this, and appreciates pecuiliar things. Whatever reason she had for living as a hermit, he can relate to the lifestyle and feelings surrounding it.

I don’t want the characters to have any sort of relationship before the murder case. Like I said before, I’m not writing the beggining of anything here, the story opens with the detective in the middle of the case. If one knew about the other, they kept it a secret. There’s been no contact made between the two before the night of the investigation. If the detective had followed her around during her life, he dances around mentioning this in the narraration.

Balancing confidence and overeager doomed investigating is proving to be hard to write. I don’t want the guy to sound like an unprofessional schmuck that is letting his feelings get the best of him, just someone who has a burning curiosity about something that is remarkably appealing and interesting to him.

I’m going to finish this for the first time ever real soon.

And then rewrite the ever living hell out of it a thousand times over.

13

I see I made a few typos in my first post which meant I didn’t even ask what I wanted to ask! So, here we go again…
Girl is found brutally (or at least bloodily) murdered. Not obviously a suicide (so slit wrists are out, gun isn’t in/next to/near her hand, no needles, no bottle of pills (or tox evidence of them) etc). So it looks, even to professionals, that the girl was beaten to death i.e. killed by someone else. Right?

So there’s likely to be SOME evidence of another person… hair, fingerprints, etc. But that person isn’t your detective? I mean, if your detective is in the room, he’s going to see “someone else was here” especially if it was a violent death (footprints in blood, whatever). Most pros would too. So they must go outside the room to look for friends, family, stalkers, etc who could be the girl’s killer. If a detective is investigating, he’s likely to wear gloves and even if not, then his fingerprints are excluded from evidence as a matter of course… I mean, it’s common knowledge that cops lose hair, skin, leave prints just like any other human does, so the police/labs assume they will find this, know Cop X was investigating, and disregard the evidence.

So you need evidence planted in such a way that it was clearly there BEFORE the girls death, that would point to your detective as being the killer. Semen on the bedsheets or something. Which means a) he knew her before and had been there or b)somehow the girl stole a used condom or something and spread the contents around, deliberately framing him. So she needs to have noticed him, even if he didn’t know her. OR you actually have a killer, a third person, who does all that, to frame your cop deliberately.

Even if your story doesn’t start with all this backstory, you must know what it is in order to use it, or your story doesn’t make any sense.

UNLESS, you are writing as if the detective DID do it, but then why have him narrate a whole obsession with her stuff, unless you want to go the cliché route of having him have split personalities or a drug induced murder (I swear, Your Honour, I was sleepwalking when I killed this stranger!).

I think you need either one of two things: 1) girl stalked HIM, and set him up or 2)Unidentified stranger has a beef against him, and set him up.

The more interesting one with the psychological aspect you are going for is #1, but in that case, you can’t have blood, or bullet holes, or a bludgeoning, because someone else had to do it to the girl! So it must be something she could do herself (it IS a suicide) but which a killer MIGHT do (poison), and she’s laid the groundwork for him being identified as the only person who could have done it.

And your narration will have to leave the room, or come from someone other than your detective (dead girl talking?) in order to highlight the reasoning the other cops would have for arresting him at the end… unless your last scene has the detective sitting in her room, staring at something, and everything comes into focus and he realises he’s been set up… but that isn’t really ambiguous, is it? I doubt he’ll ever be thinking “maybe I did do it?”

From what you’ve described, I don’t think you can tie this story up without changing what you want as the outcome.

Or maybe I’m still missing something?

A hanging might do it, though, if you don’t want to go the poison route. I’m not sure how you could have her hang herself and make it look like it was done to her, but maybe someone smarter than me can come up with something (the melting block of ice, perhaps?!?!) and have the rope lead back to something your detective has on his farm (matching frayed edges or something). But again, you need a third party narrator and you need to leave the room for that exposition.

14

Let me back up a second and rethink this, then. So the premise is:

The girl and the detective had zero contact before the girl’s death. Girl dies by some means, cops are called to investigate, then the detective is called, as he is examining the room for evidence he becomes intrigued by the person in question, and by paying more attention than your average joe schmoes cop he discovers something that, planted by the girl before her death, frames the detective for her death?

It is possible to write in something that works if this is solely what is needed; I’m not sure if anything would work if you want this and a possibility that the detective had really done it. If it is written in the first person, the detective had no reason to hide his thoughts of remorse/satisfaction/some feeling for his own murder. It just doesn’t make sense.

If you write it in the third person, though, it can be done… still, since the girl has no foreknowledge of the detective whatsoever whatever trap that she set to frame her victim has to fit a certain description without being specific as to who it is. I guess she had been searching for a man like the detective all her life, but she harbors enough hate for his type that she, through death, pits the detective into his downfall?

According to you, we have to rule out outright stupidity and moment of passion. I guess the only thing left that works is that curiosity got the best of him. Is it possible to set up the room in such a way so that it is also one big piece of puzzle, full of coded messages that only the most devote can solve? Then the average cop, who is probably not in the mood for riddles or cleverly hidden clues, would look the other way. The clues would eventually lead to a Pandora’s box of sorts that opens a whole can of worms for the detective…

well, I should probably stop here so you can check and see if this is going the right way… it feels a little “da Vinci Code” to me and I’m not sure if this is the kind of mood you’re going for. Setting up the scene of murder as one big logical puzzle seems a bit… far fetched, even if I’m the one who came up with the idea.

15

[QUOTE=mnemosyne]
I see I made a few typos in my first post which meant I didn’t even ask what I wanted to ask! So, here we go again…
Girl is found brutally (or at least bloodily) murdered. Not obviously a suicide (so slit wrists are out, gun isn’t in/next to/near her hand, no needles, no bottle of pills (or tox evidence of them) etc). So it looks, even to professionals, that the girl was beaten to death i.e. killed by someone else. Right?

So you need evidence planted in such a way that it was clearly there BEFORE the girls death, that would point to your detective as being the killer. Semen on the bedsheets or something. Which means a) he knew her before and had been there or b)somehow the girl stole a used condom or something and spread the contents around, deliberately framing him. So she needs to have noticed him, even if he didn’t know her. OR you actually have a killer, a third person, who does all that, to frame your cop deliberately.

I think you need either one of two things: 1) girl stalked HIM, and set him up or 2)Unidentified stranger has a beef against him, and set him up.

And your narration will have to leave the room, or come from someone other than your detective (dead girl talking?) in order to highlight the reasoning the other cops would have for arresting him at the end… unless your last scene has the detective sitting in her room, staring at something, and everything comes into focus and he realises he’s been set up… but that isn’t really ambiguous, is it? I doubt he’ll ever be thinking “maybe I did do it?”
A hanging might do it, though, if you don’t want to go the poison route. I’m not sure how you could have her hang herself and make it look like it was done to her, but maybe someone smarter than me can come up with something (the melting block of ice, perhaps?!?!) and have the rope lead back to something your detective has on his farm (matching frayed edges or something). But again, you need a third party narrator and you need to leave the room for that exposition.
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You got the summary correct.

There will be enough details that you can read into a backstory. My favorite written works are those that are very short, but very high on style. I want to write something like that. I don’t want to use five chapters going through procedures and details if it adds nothing to the overall meaning of the story. There are ways to inject the backstory into the “now”. That’s what I’m aiming to for. I’m really trying to condense this thing.

And as for the usage of cliches assuming if the detective did do it: Ick. I enjoy using cliches or familiar styles/genres if I think I’ve found an interesting way of twisting it around, or if I think it compliments a stories theme or meaning nicely, but not just outright. And even if I did do it outright, I’d either be ironic or think long and hard about how to make it enjoyable for the reader in spite of my cheapness.

And balancing the possibility that he did do it with her possesing something of his in a timepod of sorts…tricky. I think we’re looking at these possibilities:

She doneit
[ul]
[li]Jane Doe used the assitance of an aquintance of which there exists no papertrail or evidence of to kill her. [/li][li]Jane Doe killed herself by using the sorry state of her surroundings to her advantage. She doesn’t use an aquaintance, but rather opens the flood gates to danger and as a result gets herself killed.[/li][li]Jane doe kills herself through means that make the case look like murder.[/li][/ul]

Option one sounds easy but cheap, and not very rewarding for either the reader or myself. Option two has potential, but then there’s the question as to why nothing was stolen. A person might have a reason to kill a girl and not take anything. I think your average killer killing a rich girl who keeps to herself is probably in it for free shit. There is the possibility she did something to attract a particular murderer. I’m not sure if that would be stretching things a bit…but she does have a laptop…she could do research or even contact on such a person. I don’t like item three either. I want a death with some trauma behind it.

He doneit [ul]
[li]He properly disposed of his murder weapon, but incidentally she was obsessed with him and planned a frame without his knowing. [/li][li]He activates a lethal booby trap that would kill any detetive who looks too hard.[/li][/ul]

Item one has an obvious problem: How in the hell do you steal something that belongs to someone who’s obsessing with you? Well…I reckon a guy has to go to work sometime. News would keep her up to date on recent cases within her neck of the woods. Item two would be easier and more plausible, but I would prefer not to end the story with the detectives death for reasons I’ll go into in a bit.

One possibility is for her to hide something of his inside one of the walls behind the Post It Notes. Say she’s been writing down her state of mind for years, then the layers of the notes would determine how long the item behind the wall had been there. Sure, it’s flimsy, and off the top of my head, but it’s a possibility worth playing around with.
Right now the story is written with the narrator in his own private jail cell for bookends. He describes himself going over the details of the case over and over again like a dog chasing it’s own tail. Hopefully he’ll get tired and just lay down. I think the story would be tighter if it didn’t include the jail bits, but at the same time I like to think Jane Do meant for him to be there as him spending years to himself in complete solitude would better allow him to relate to her before he got the chair. I’ve played with the idea of giving her an alias, and then for there to be a plaque in his cell that mentions that his wing of the jail was built using a generous donation from her.

But then that’s getting really out there, isn’t it?

But in any case, having a narrator sitting in a cell does give him an opportunity to delve into what they nabbed him on and the responses made by the police. If the detective just dies at the end all of this is taken away.

As for his being the narrator and the murderer, I was going to go with the idea that in his mind, he’s recreating her in a sense by murdering her. Like I said, as I said before, one of her attractions that he has to her is that there isn’t a whole lot about her that makes sense. Perhaps he thinks not only would she be more intriguing as a murder victim, but that her being one would finally allow the two of them to meet (since she’s now “fulfilled her potential”). I’d think with this reasoning a person would walk into said murder case with a fresh approach. Somewhere between stark denial and him splitting up the victim as she was alive and as she is dead into two seperate people, he doesn’t think about himself as the killer. I’ve definitely seen people act outrageously out of denial, but the hard part wouldn’t be believing in that mindest myself so much as it would be convincing the audience.

[QUOTE=jamus_se]
Let me back up a second and rethink this, then. So the premise is:

The girl and the detective had zero contact before the girl’s death. Girl dies by some means, cops are called to investigate, then the detective is called, as he is examining the room for evidence he becomes intrigued by the person in question, and by paying more attention than your average joe schmoes cop he discovers something that, planted by the girl before her death, frames the detective for her death?

It is possible to write in something that works if this is solely what is needed; I’m not sure if anything would work if you want this and a possibility that the detective had really done it. If it is written in the first person, the detective had no reason to hide his thoughts of remorse/satisfaction/some feeling for his own murder. It just doesn’t make sense.

According to you, we have to rule out outright stupidity and moment of passion. I guess the only thing left that works is that curiosity got the best of him. Is it possible to set up the room in such a way so that it is also one big piece of puzzle, full of coded messages that only the most devote can solve? Then the average cop, who is probably not in the mood for riddles or cleverly hidden clues, would look the other way. The clues would eventually lead to a Pandora’s box of sorts that opens a whole can of worms for the detective…

well, I should probably stop here so you can check and see if this is going the right way… it feels a little “da Vinci Code” to me and I’m not sure if this is the kind of mood you’re going for. Setting up the scene of murder as one big logical puzzle seems a bit… far fetched, even if I’m the one who came up with the idea.
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The detective and the girl had no contact outside of this murder case, but one may have been obsessed with the other, or possibly they both may have been into each other without knowing it.

I would imagine her motive would be obsession as well. Perhaps she believed, as he does, that the only way they would have met and clicked was at a murder scene. Her murder scene. Nothing hateful here, she loved him and wanted him for her own, dead or alive. If dead was the only way she believed in, so be it.

Curiosity is indeed what killed this cat. I’m not really fond of the puzzle idea either, it sorta goes against the groove of the story. Plus I’ve never really been fond of stories where one post mortem character (or bad guy) creates clues for another character. In the case of my story, I think I’d wonder why she had to go through all that just for the end result. There’s always a quicker way.

Unless her thing was to create puzzles which unveiled naked pictures of herself when solved.

Hmm…I’m really beggining to wonder if it wouldn’t be best just to have her kill him at the end.