The secret history of crime

[jeregenest]

I’ve been thinking about Gumshoes (the engine behind Esoterrorists and Trail of Cthulu) and what I’d run for it as a campaign. While I’ve thought of different crime genres and subgenres that could work. Match this to secret history (and occult detectives) and its the particular blend of stuff that I seem to be notorious for. But I’ll be honest I’m extremely tempted o play it safe. No deep conspiracies, no occult, no weird.
I’m thinking of a grand arch of stories, made up of different smaller archs set in a different decade(ish) and a different style of crime/mystery. Set in the same city (with perhaps exceptions) this would capture the importance of the city as a character in many of the great crime novels (most recently think Lehane or Pecanoes).

Where to start is tough. The occult buff in me wants to turn to Poe, but I think for simplicty sake I’d do Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes: Starting here, the longest lasting of the detectives seems a no-brainer. Holmes is famous for his intellectual prowess, and is renowned for his skillful use of "deductive reasoning" while using abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation) and astute observation to solve difficult cases. The arch about scientific detectives would equally pay tribute to the Holmes of the first two novellas: the uncanny, bohemian, manic-depressive genius who stalks the fellow fog of London, takes cocaine and morphine to ease the torment of living in “this dreary, dismal, unprofitable world,” and abates his drug habit by compulsively scheming to peel bak the common place surface of other people’s lives, portraying secret histories of violence and vice.

I’m really tempted to then segue into Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (perhaps not in order) but that may be too much Victoriana.

The Golden Age of Detectives (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayer and Ellery Queen): The 1920s adventure will focus on the style of detective story in which an outsider -- most often a gifted amateur -- investigates a murder committed in a closed environment by one of a limited number of suspects. Gumshoes will be tested for its ability to conform to the confines of the whodunit, where great ingenuity may be exercised in narrating the events of the crime, usually a homicide, and of the subsequent investigation in such a manner as to conceal the identity of the criminal from the reader until the end of the book, when the method and culprit are revealed. In particular the story will be structured on S.S Van Dine's Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.

Weird Menace and Supernatural Detectives: Paul Chadwick and Donald Wandrei meet William Hope Hodgson. Probably set in the 30s -too late for Hodgson, but I need something to cut Chadwick with.

The American great PI, tribute to Raymond Chandler/Dashiel Hammet and all that beautiful film noir, set in the late 30s.

A tribute to Spillane, MacDonald, McBain (tough guys all) set in the 60s.

In the 80s/90s there’d be a Lawyers-at-Large arch, paying tribute to Turow, Grisham, and Lescroart amongst others.

Police procedurals; I’d like to set police procedurals in the 50s (Dragnet), 70s (Police Story), 80s (Hill Street Blues), 90s (Homicide: Life on the Streets) and today (CSI and the Wire).

What I’m missing includes:

• Serial killer plot, probably involving FBI agents. May be able to unite this with X-Files. Both make the most sense in the 90s, which may be getting full.
  
• Spy masters: Whether leCarre or something more “amercianized” like McCarry, Littell, Silva, or Furst. Out of that list Furst is the one I like the best. Maybe do a WWII spy story in his style?
  
• I really feel compelled to pay tribute to the work of Grafton, Paretsky and Highsmith.
  
• What about the medical thriller?
  

So timeline I have (help me fill in the gaps):
1880s -- Sherlock Holmes
1920s -- Golden Age
1930s -- Weird Menace
1930s (late) -- American PI
1940s -- WWII (Furst), maybe
1950s (late) -- Dragnet style Police procedural
1960s -- Tough Guys
1970s -- Police Story style police procedural
1982 -- Hill Street Blues style police procedural
1989 -- Lawyers-at-Large
1995 -- Homicide style Police Procedural
2004 -- The Wire meets CSI style police procedural

Fleshing out to be a very interesting game concept. So this post is to gauge interest, solicit feedback and commit to developing more.

The only mechanical challenge I envision with Gumshoes is the need to create an appropriate ability list for each story. A great detective set of characters ill have very different investigative abilities from a character from Spillane.

Comments

[allegedly.livejournal.com]

Of course I don't have the context, but I definitely admire the list. I'm curious to hear more!

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Chances are you will. I'm rather prone to spending a lot of time ruinating about the games that really grab me.

[badger.livejournal.com]

James Ellroy did a serial killer story in one of his novels set in the ffties, which tend to feel like tough guy noir to me. Also possibly fitting the gumshoe game system would be Andrew Vachss' Burke novels (first one _Flood_ in 1985, most recent one about to be released). For spy thrillers I like Adam Hall's Quiller novels, but I'm not sure that the gumshoe system is a good fit for the feel of those. But perhaps.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Mmmm...Ellroy, totally forgot to look at him. Maybe since I seem to be leaning for 2 a decade post WWII I should fit him into the 60s. But then I have to figure out how to run an Ellroy game. Not sure I can do his literary style much merit.

There are lot of good British spy masters I didn't reference, and Trevor Dudley-Smith is definitely one of them (as well as Deighton). I was thinking it would be best to draw from an American spy writer, but most of them drive me nuts. Except for Furst. I rather wish Furst would write a modern spy novel. Okay an argument could be made that Furst isn't all that American either, but I'm going to go for the "he was born here" argument.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

I really ought to write a post sometime about how, even after all this time, I'm still impressed with the way tantaene approached the sweep of history and how my favorite part was the shared construction of a mythology, with the historical preludes, which we kind of fell down on actually using in play.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull would be a factor here.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

We did a lot of things right in tantanea, we did get a good 18 months of gaming and probably should have ended it earlier.

And you kinow me, I love the historical arcs.

Whats the connection to Indiana? I must admit to not having seen the new movie.

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

So as you could tell from the title, there's a crystal skull in the movie, and there are a few scenes wherein Indy and his rivals and friends try to piece together the skull's origins and movements, and others where various characters guess at and try to use the skull's hidden locked-away power (I don't feel I'm spoiling anything by sharing this). When I was watching those scenes in the theater I was of course (I am after all nothing if not self-referential) reminded of tantaene and my crystal skull, and how, in the gameworld of tantaene, it's easy to imagine scholars and antiquarians stumbling across the various items of power that our cabal had created and discarded over the years, and done very similar kinds of puzzling.

And this got me thinking about how, and this is something that grows in hindsight, my favorite part of tantaene (even more than the way the magic system was codified, which was also awesome) was the elaborate sprawling globe-spanning spiderweb of secret history that we constructed in play. That was a lot of fun. The part where the game started to fall down was after we finished that, because we had a hard time moving out of that mode into something else. In retrospect I would have been happy to create low-level mortal occult investigators and devote the game to ferreting out secrets that we the players already knew the answers to, but I'm weird like that, and the characters we had at that point were way too old and powerful and knowledgeable to have much interest in the bones of their past.

If I was going to try to build on that structure, I would, I think, abandon the idea of playing in the setting at the modern-day level at the end completely, and just increase the number of planned historical epochs to nine or ten, and expand each one from 1-2 sessions to 4-5, and stop once we're finished.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

That definitely makes sense.

[editswlonghair.livejournal.com]

How about Swinging 60s shows like 'The Saint', 'The Avengers', and 'The Mod Squad'?

Is 'Trail of Cthulhu' a stand-alone game, or do you have to buy 'Esoterrorists' to get the core Gumshoe system?

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Its standalone. Each of the three (soon to be four) games are different approaches to gumshoes and have slight mechanical variants.

Swinging Sixties

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Thought about that, but they're too British and too goofy for me. I'm still considering a Man from Uncle or a Mission Impossible arc, especially if there was interest.

At the other end of the spectrum...

[editswlonghair.livejournal.com]

How about late 70's/early 80's style Revenge Porn a la 'Death Wish', 'Dirty Harry', Sam Peckinpah... Definitely not too British or too goofy! ;)

But probably not enough investigation to make it worth using Gumshoe. How good is the combat system?

Re: At the other end of the spectrum...

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Combat in Gumshoe really is light weight, its mroe about overcoming those adrenaline moments so you can get back to the important stuff (and maybe get a clue from the combat)

Re: Revenge Porn

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

That stuff grows out of the tough guy writing of Spillane, MacDonald and McBain for me. Just les detection and more action adventure. I want to steer away from the purely action/adventrue side of things and focus on the detection and the human cost around it.

[bryant]

I think this is a cool idea that doesn't fit my interests -- while I love cities as characters, I'm not sure how it jibes with my immersive leanings.

Possibly there's a workaround involving players controlling families... huh. Almost Micheneresque in scope. Or, ha, Clavell.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

My idea is that the characters of the previous story archs are the major supporting NPCs of the current. So that could easily include families (biological or otherwise).

The dragnet era rookie is the tough detective friend or obstructio in the 60's tough guys and is the polcie chief/comissioner for the 70s and is looked to for evidence about a distant character in the 80s. That sort of stuff.

[jeffr23.livejournal.com]

Hm. It looks like you'd have little problem structurally fitting in a 'teenage detectives' story somewhere. (And considering that the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew serieses ran pretty much forever, you can fit it into any time period you like. If you can fit it in, theme-and-tone-wise, of course.)

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Yeah if the family becomes more important than teen detectives are a must. Have to check and see what the heyday of the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew were.

[jeffr23.livejournal.com]

Something about me finds starting with Holmes rather than Dupin a bit incorrect, although it certainly is your choice to make...

The post-Holmes gap can at least have Tom Sawyer, Detective dropped into it, I suppose.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

The thing is Dupin is rather dull and I can't think of anything he offers that Holmes doesn't already do. I'm trying to hit major stylistic changes, and I just don't feel them. For the the difference between Poe and Doyle (Dupin and Holmes) is the same as between Christie and Sayers (Poiroit and Wimple). But I'm open for persuasion.

The post-Holmes gap can at least have Tom Sawyer, Detective dropped into it, I suppose.

Tell me more.

[jeffr23.livejournal.com]

You may be right about Dupin. Actually, since, you're considering detection as a whole rather than simply private detection, the question of which of those is primary becomes less important, and the 'pre-history' stretches considerably further back... (With Javert, Hamlet, and God coming to mind immediately)

Tom Sawyer, Detective was one of Twain's lesser works, but as a burlesque of Holmes' immediate successors it's probably a better way than most to absorb the detection zeitgeist between Doyle and the Turn of the century.

Also, Chesterton's Father Brown can slot in just before the Golden Age (even though his career does span that period and the next, it starts in the nineteen-teens...)

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

I thought about Father Brown, but the hardcore Christianness scared me.