I'm in the middle of choosing if I should make my story more dark ad sinister with the film noir dominantly driving my influences or have it comedy taking bits and pieces from the genre to exaggerate simple situation.
Right! here goes my first resolved story idea which is the comical take...
The detective is at home making dinner in the kitchen, but he is a workaholic so he has his work with him at all times. He is looking at a case file in his hand with 'top secret' printed on the front. He is making soup and he stirs it as it boils on the stove as he mumbles to himself engrossed in reading. For a second he leans over the soup to check on it when his glasses fall off his face into the boiling sauce pan. After seconds of trying to find the glasses the light bulb in the kitchen blows. In the darkness he finds his detective night-vision goggles but they are slightly dysfunctional. He moves over to the cupboard to get a replacement bulb but opens the fridge instead and picks up an egg. Carefully balancing on a chair he screws the egg into the socket and stumbles over to flip the switch. He flips the switch and the egg glows and boils till it explodes... the screen blacks out to reveal the detective eating his dinner reading the file again in a scrambled egg filled kitchen.
While writing this it reminds me of a Mr. Bean type sketch :/...
The only issue is that the egg doesn't feel like it's really functioning as a proper story component. It's got comic potential, certainly, but also, the detective character isn't important here; it could be any kind of character getting 'egg on his face'. The basic motivation for a detective is to solve mysteries - not change lightbulbs - and the fact that he's working at the kitchen table, again, feels like the true potential of your components are going under-used.
ReplyDeleteThere are other kinds of eggs, for example - that might better suit a crime-based scenario - check out the famous Faberge eggs, for example.
Also - the idea that the kitchen is the crime scene itself, not the detective's domestic space...