Day 23: The Silent Movie: A Who Did What

Project for November 23, 2013

So in order to make sure that I get a decent story that isn't too long and complicated, I decided to use a book called Cleverly Crafted Five-Minute Mysteries.  It really is a lot of fun to read and try to guess the solutions.

I wanted to make sure that it would fit within my framework, so I tested several of them out. Again, it had to be doable.  I want this to be a fun movie, but I also don't want to have to worry about the details.  There was one that I thought would work really well.  It's called "Homicide at 24 North Bleaker Street" - but it only had three characters and one of them was the detective and the puzzle would be easier to solve on screen because there were only two possibilities.  Using the details of that crime, I could adapt the story to fit my own by adding some evidence and two more suspects.  I think it will work, so here is the gist of it:

The Grim Reaper comes to the victim and tells them they need to cross over.  They refuse unless Grim agrees to catch their killer.  Grim has a quota to meet so he decides to enlist the help of a mortal - the detective.  After all, he needs someone to present the evidence to the authorities to close the case.

He finds the private detective in a part of town that doesn't have a lot of  business so he thinks that she will be grateful.  She's neither grateful nor intimidated and tells him to leave.  He tells her that he can guarantee her some more clients if she will help him with this one case.  She finally agrees.

They go to interview a neighbor first.  She tells them that she saw someone go into the house, but they were wearing a trench coat and a hat and nondescript shoes and they they didn't know who it was, just that they thought they saw some long hair. 

They go to interview the suspects.  Suspect #1 is a woman who worked personally with the victim as a businesses partner.  She talks about how much of a jerk the victim was and how much she and her new business partner were cheated.  Suspect #2 is a friend who used to invite the victim and her family over for barbecues.  He doesn't believe that anyone would have waned to kill the victim, but admits that he didn't know her well enough to know all the people she knew.  Suspect #3 is the victim's brother.  He says that his sibling had a secret life and told no one very much about what she did.  Said he didn't know why she would ever have enemies because she was always checking up on the people she cared about.

In each interview with the suspects, the detective asks if they know the neighbor by name.  None of them admit to knowing her.  Butane of them slips up by saying that the neighbor should mind their own business, but instead of using her name, they use a physical characteristic that wasn't mentioned by the detective.  That slip up makes them investigate the suspect further and they discover some damming evidence.

Thus the case is solved, the victim is satisfied, Grim is satisfied, and the detective gets more work. 

Even though this sounds like a really brief way of getting through the story, it helps to flesh it out a little more.  Now I just need to cast the characters and write the script!