| |
|
Inspired by the Movie Prequels thread elsewhere, I've decided to put forth an idea me and some mates have been kicking around for a while. Barbelith readers will be familiar with the current trend for mystery novels featuring historical figures - The Interpretation of Murder, featuring Sigmund Freud, kicked off this trend, and was followed by The Critique of Criminal Reason, featuring Immanuel Kant and recently, god help us, Gyles Brandreth's novel which features Oscar Wilde solving mysteries, and threatens to become the beginning of a series.
What me and some of my friends have been doing is kicking around some ideas for new novels featuring historical figures in detective capers. So far we have:
The Jesus Christ Mysteries: On the mean streets of first century Palestine, part time carpenter, fisherman and messiah Jesus Christ tackles the crimes the Romans can't - or won't - take on. But each case ends in frustration for Jesus' hotheaded partner, Simon Peter, when Christ opts to forgive the culprit, rather than taking revenge.
Adolf Hitler Investigates: In the Germany of the inter-war years, jobbing painter and fascist madbastard Adolf Hitler investigates the cases the bumbling, corrupt cops of the Weimar republic can't solve. In each episode, Hitler ignores a blindingly obvious series of clues indicating who actually committed the crime, and instead concocts a ludicrous explanation which invariably pins the blame on the one person connected to the case who happens to be Jewish/a communist/a freemason/a trade unionist/disabled/gay, which, for some reason, the German authorities are only too happy to go along with.
The beauty of this is that, like the CSI brand, we can franchise it into other series if successful: Karl Marx Investigates, in which the villain always turns out to be capitalism; Mao Tse-Tung Investigates, in which Mao persuades the culprit to give himself up on the grounds that there'll be no reprisals, then spends the next half-hour of the episode brutally torturing them; and, of course, Josef Stalin Investigates, in which the Russian tyrant spends the entire series trying to solve a single crime, pinning the blame on different individuals or groups and then ruthlessly exterminating them each episode.
Coleridge and Wordsworth, Poetic Investigators - a kind of Romantic-era Without a Clue, in which Sam Coleridge wanders around the Lake District in an opium-soaked haze, and investigates crimes by barking, gurning and attempting to hypnotise witnesses and suspects with 'galvanic mesmerism' while his sidekick Wordsworth 'interprets' Coleridge's crazed noises to provide the actual solution to the case. Very much in the Heartbeat mode, each episode will contain, on average, half an hours' worth of footage of rolling hills, shining lakes, and gruff shepherds herding sheep in the way they have done since time immemorial.
That's what we've got so far - any other ideas? |
|
|
