Here’s the deal. Penguin and Specsavers ask crime fans ‘in the twitter community’ (Wot???) to ‘contribute plot devices’. Three established crime writers are then asked to build a short story around these ‘crowdsourced plot points’.
Does anything interesting result? No. Well, maybe a little. The twitter community’s suggestions are predictably banal – save one. The proposed ‘murder type’ is that the victims should all be the followers of a twitter account – and who has not been roused to murderous thoughts by social media? But more important, what is contributed is not plot: the hero’s python-skin cowboy boots are not plot, nor is her specified height or her age, or her ‘personality traits’ (‘sleeps badly’ FYI).
Wisely, the three writers ignore most of the contributions. When they do feel obliged to drop in those boots (for example) you can hear the dull thud. Nicci French is the only one of the three to do anything really ingenious with the victim-category. French also makes best use of the hero’s designated profession (travel photographer): it is her followers who supply the victims. Weaver and Gunn both wrench this glamorous job into something more useful to them: in Weaver’s South African setting (the twitterati asked for Dorset) she is filling in down-time by assisting an understaffed police-post; in Gunn’s story she is reduced to snapping roadworks for a provincial newspaper.
Crime and the short-story format aren’t natural bedfellows. Complex back-story puts too much of a strain on a spare form. Here, the hero is required to have ‘fallen in love in a neurotic and distracting way’. French’s boy friend is promisingly sinister, but ends up as a red herring. Gunn’s romantic interest obliges him to pile in a load of pre-history that might just have been plausible in a full-length novel, but doesn’t work in a tight space. Weaver just isn’t interested – indeed, the most powerful aspects of his story are (literally) half a world away from the cliché-ridden proposition that was put to him.
Did the writers find this an interesting challenge? I doubt it, though they may not want to upset their followers. If there’s one thing this fatuous exercise confirms, it’s that the twitter gang is seldom interesting – but it can get very nasty.
