A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 5
This is the fifth year in a row I’ve run this series in April. Why a story idea each day for the month? Several reasons which I’ll work my through during this series of posts. Here’s another one:
Thinking up new story ideas keeps you on your creative toes.
If a part of your consciousness is attuned at all times to an instinct to look, hear and listen to everything as a possible story idea, you keep your general level of creativity engaged.
It’s the difference between being in your car and letting whatever is on the radio drift in and out of your brain barely processing it versus actively connected to the images and feelings the stimulus evokes.
This is not to say you shouldn’t have some QVT: Quality Veg Time. Sometimes you just need to shut it down. But if you elevate your awareness about generating story ideas, one thing you will discover is how much time you spend doing — essentially — nothing.
Even if you spend just a bit of that time actively engaged in the story-generation process, you enliven your creativity.
Today’s story idea: Solving Cold Cases at the Detectives’ Lunch Club.
On a brisk day last November, law enforcement professionals and forensic scientists crowded into a dining room at the Union League in downtown Philadelphia to eat lunch and stare at photos of dead bodies. The contrast was startling: fine steaks served on white china, sumptuous wallpaper dimly lit by elegant candelabra, and blood and limbs projected onto a screen. Tucked into the back of the room, I struggled to keep down my coffee. My tablemates, most of them graying and austere, clad in smart, dark suits, seemed unbothered.
“Can you make the picture a little bigger?” shouted one.
“It’s hard to see the hands,” added another.
The hands in question belonged to David Hayes, a retiree from a small town in Nebraska. Two years earlier, in the fall of 2010, an intruder had broken into the back door of a condo owned by David and his wife, Joan. David was savagely shot and bludgeoned to death; Joan was stabbed repeatedly in the chest and face. A pocketknife emblazoned with the logo of the Nebraska State Police was found buried in Joan’s sternum.
The details mystified police. Nothing appeared stolen. Joan was posed in a sexual way — her nightgown jimmied up around her neck, her legs splayed apart. Rings of table salt were spread in careful circles around the bodies. The pages of a rare edition of the Bible were scattered over David’s corpse, and there were multiple, careful stab wounds around his eyes.
After two years of investigation, the case was ice-cold. So in late 2012, David Schumann and Pete Webber, the Nebraska cops running the case, packed information on the Hayes murders into manila envelopes and sent them to the headquarters of the Vidocq (pronounced vee-dock) Society, a crime-solving organization founded in 1990 by a group of forensics specialists. Well-known in law enforcement circles, the Vidocq Society is a last resort — it’s where cops turn when every lead has come to naught. For Schumann and Webber, it was their best and perhaps last hope for a break. If the Vidocq Society couldn’t crack the case, nobody could.
At first, there were three: William Fleisher, Richard Walter, and Frank Bender. At the time, Fleisher, now retired, was a police officer turned FBI special agent turned chief of Customs Service in Philadelphia. Walter was a respected crime scene analyst and forensic psychologist for the Michigan prison system — what Hollywood calls a profiler. Bender (who passed away in 2011) was a forensic reconstructionist who specialized in taking the skulls of murder victims and sculpting recognizable three-dimensional models of their faces.
In 1989, Bender introduced Walter to Fleisher over lunch, and the three men got to talking about old cases — the ones that congealed like aging butter, the ones investigators abandoned for lack of time or resources. They talked for three hours, leading Fleisher to make a proposal: Why not formalize this process into a kind of club where they could more rigorously tackle the cases that interested them? Fleisher had a name in mind — the Vidocq Society, after Eugène François Vidocq, a 19th-century fraudster turned private investigator. He also supplied the motto: Veritas veritatum, or “truth begets truth.”
You can read the rest of the article via the link above, but basically for over 20 years, this group has advised law enforcement officials on hundreds and hundreds of cases, contributing to the solution of approximately 80% of them. Strikes me as an interesting premise.
I know what you’re going to say: What about the long-running TV series “Cold Case” (2003–2010)? Yes, this is a similar idea. However as we all know, Hollywood operates acquisition and development based on this philosophy: similar but different. The cold case dynamic = similar. But two key differences: (1) Develop this as a movie, one with obvious sequel possibilities. (2) Instead of a young female lead like the TV series, why not a group of grizzled veterans? Male, female, representing multiple ethnic types. Think Expendables or Red, with all of our crew in their 60s, even 70s.
Much like the recent reboot of the Sherlock Holmes franchise which transformed that the famed sleuth and Watson into action heroes, give our group a murder case that puts them smack in the middle of mystery… with bullets flying and bodies falling. Play with the trope of the Old Gunslinger yanked back into action.
Of course, being retired law enforcement types, technically they would be out of their jurisdiction which would put them into direct conflict with at least some of the current local police and/or federal authorities. Milk the whole Old Cop vs. Young Cop dynamic as well as Modern Technology vs. Street Smarts and Gut Instinct.
Throw in some twists and turns, a few explosions here and there, looks like an action movie with a healthy dose of humor to me.
Or how about a darker spin. There was a movie back in 1983: The Star Chamber: “Disgusted with criminals escaping the judicial system via technicalities, an idealistic young judge investigates an alternative method for punishing the guilty.” Basically a group of judges was meeting privately to assess cases where a criminal had been set free due to some legal technicality. If the judges reviewed the case and found the criminal to, indeed, be guilty, they hired hitmen to take out the criminal. Sort of like “Dexter” only he himself is both judge, jury and hitman.
What if this group not only solves cold cases, but then goes about whacking the criminals?
There you go: My fifth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!
Now it’s your turn. What would you do with this story setup?
Each day this month, I invite you to join me in comments to do some brainstorming. Gender bend, genre bend, what if. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when we play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.
See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.
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