Forward
In early 2007 I was presented with an interesting proposition in the form of a long-term contract writing noir detective fiction for a jigsaw puzzle game published by a major player in the online casual gaming market. Each story was to be sliced up between 5 royalty-free images - images that I'd select for each of the five "chapters" to foreshadow the solution to the mystery.
There was a catch - because it wouldn't be feasible to submit the story to the ESRB every month - I had to strictly avoid topics that might trigger the need to bring them in. That meant that sex, drugs, murder, and even alcohol, couldn't make an appearance on the pages of my noir mystery.
Always up for a challenge (and hungry for an ongoing contract) - I accepted the gig.
The game's producer confessed to me that players often complained about having to click through the stories to get to the puzzles themselves, so I took it upon myself as a challenge to see how many of them I could win over to actually caring about the world I would build for them.
What follows are the 35 cases I wrote over the course of three years.