Killing By Committee

It was only a month ago that Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai debuted the “Crime Book Club,” an online discussion group operating via the Barnes & Noble Web site, but already he’s getting ambitious with the project. Following up on a recent conversation topic about “writers who pick up unfinished work by other authors and complete or continue it,” he’s launched an associated thread that invites any club member to contribute to the building of a crime story, “one paragraph (or chunk, anyway) at a time.”

The basic rules, as spelled out at the top of this thread, are pretty simple: “Anyone who’d like to continue the story is free to do so--just keep your contribution down to a few paragraphs at most (say, 20 lines maximum). Try to keep the plot moving forward, and let’s see if we can produce a story that actually makes logical sense (though even if it doesn’t, we’ll have fun along the way). If you want to participate more than once, that’s fine--but please allow at least four other people to contribute before you post again.”

Ardai wrote the premiere installment, while others--including Duane Swierczynski (The Blonde) and Jason Starr (The Follower)--have since expanded the yarn about an unidentified old gent who stumbles into and dies in an office, after delivering a note to, it seems, the wrong man. Despite my natural skepticism, I’m curious to see where this trail and tale go from here. How cohesive can a crime story told from so many viewpoints, with no preconceived outline, possibly be?

Join in the experiment here.