By Mary Fan
When Russ first invited me to participate in the Love, Murder & Mayhem anthology for Crazy 8 Press, I was in the middle of publishing a Sherlock Holmes retelling, The Adventure of the Silicon Beeches, that takes place in the space opera future and reimagines both Sherlock and Watson as young women.
I could get on my feminist soapbox as to why I gender-swapped both roles, but I’ll save that speech for a Tweetstorm (or not… diatribes are so time-consuming, and I have fiction to write…)
Anyway, I’d written the Adventure of the Silicon Beeches as a standalone novella, but had so much fun that I decided I’d follow the Sherlockian tradition of writing multiple little mysteries starring the crime-solving duo. So when I first saw the prompt for Love, Murder & Mayhem, my mind immediately went, “Perfect! I’ll have Sherlock and Watson solve a murder mystery!”
The obvious thing to do would have been to introduce a deadly crime of passion and have the girls chase down the brokenhearted culprit. But that sounded cliché before I even started hammering out a plot. So I considered how far I could stretch the prompt and wrote to Russ asking, “Hey, does it have to be romantic love?”
