Shaw and Touma - The Puzzle of the Cracked Ship

The last Shaw and Touma story could most generously be described as a Sherlock Holmes homage, but would more accurately be called a blatant ripoff. It was also not what I would describe as a success. Everyone that read it claimed to like it well enough, but the problem was that the thing was supposed to be a mystery and yet everyone who read it solved it before the halfway point.

I thus have tried to do two things with the second Shaw and Touma story, entitled the Puzzle of the Cracked Ship.

The first is make Shaw and Touma my own. This necessarily means straying outside Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's perfected formula, which is an act that invites all sorts of disasters. This made the story a lot harder to write (five days to write this one compared to five hours to write the first one). I suppose that writing is a lot easier when another man has done the heavy lifting for you though and that there is sense in attempting to emulate a master.

The second is to make the mystery harder. I'm always weary of the JJ Abrams/Higurashi 'stupid' brand of mystery though, which makes the mystery so impenetrable that it ceases to be a mystery at all, so I can say that this story's puzzle is still perfectly solvable. It just hopefully will not be as ludicrously easy as the last puzzle.

Lastly, it should be reminded that this is set in the Grace's setting. While I've tried to make it readable for anyone, it still helps if you've read my actual novel.

Also, while on the subject, for the people that do read the novel: I haven't actually decided whether or not this is canon or anything. The idea of a super detective in the Grace setting is kind of random. For now just consider it a non-painful way for me to do some of the World Building.

I'm not sure if I'll write more of these. On one hand, they're fun, but on the other I'm not that good at them. Still, who knows what may happen as I suffer in Teacher's College. In any case, tomorrow I shall return to the finale of Grace.