Liner Notes for The Empty Coffin Caper

 

Liner Notes for The Empty Coffin Caper

What if you held a murder mystery – but no one was killed? Sorry, that doesn’t quite work. Still, you get the idea. This is in fact a theft – body snatching – but investigated like a murder mystery. Lady Jane has no patience for painstaking searches for clues, for long conversations about feuds going back two generations, strange weapons, off-comers or the familiar, poison or knife or garotte. Just get the suspects into a room and let them go off on one another.

A detective story is essentially a story of wandering round coming up with wrong answers until it’s time to find the right answer. (Sometimes the detective knows the culprit but can’t prove it; in this case it’s wandering round finding the wrong evidence until they find the right evidence. Or sometimes they don’t find it, but manage to panic the culprit into revealing themselves. Or for some stories, sometimes it never get solved, though in that case we may have strayed from the genre). And so this story, in which the suspects construct motives for one another for the murder, which it turns out are false.

I’ve constructed a complicated family dynamic to explore, only at the end for it to have nothing to do with the resolution. This is like an episode of a TV police procedural where they enter into a sub-culture, yet it turns out the crime was for regular reasons by someone not part of the group. This is the wandering round coming up with wrong answers bit. You need to make it work on it’s own, to be (at worst) a pleasant excursion for we the audience while the detectives eliminate suspects. Pleasant for us; hopefully the detective is at least a little uncomfortable or out of their depth.

One final note is that Lady Jane is known for interfering in affairs, in rooting out scandal and wrongdoing. More often she discreetly deals with events yet sometimes they become public knowledge. We’re running into the Miss Marple problem; Miss Marple knows the people in St Mary Mead, and has license to be a busybody to do her investigating. Yet the people she’s investigating can’t act as though they know of her as a notorious detective. Anyway, acknowledge, then dismiss, as people get carried away. They’ve invited Lady Jane in, she knows too much, it’s too late to tell her to clear off. And they can’t act as one against her because they suspect each other.