The She-Empress Vanishes
Marni Barnes’s star might have waned long ago, but she was still a woman who upheld standards. Her nightlife might have been reduced to the bridge club in the penthouse atop the SRO where she now lived, but she still donned a rusty little black dress and one of the wigs lined on a shelf behind her dressing screen, before she summoned the cage elevator to bear her upstairs to partake of the single glass of wine that came along with the free buffet. Or as she termed it, one dressed for dinner.
Marni was equally a stickler for the etiquette of bridge, snapping for the director over revokes, inadequate bids, faulty claims, or when anyone other than the dummy touched the upturned cards. Or as she would prefer to put it, she still held to the urbane standard set by Charles Goren—with whom she had partnered, she added in a way that suggested a partnership that went beyond the bridge table—back in the days when a man would not dare to show up at a bridge tournament in anything but black tie, let alone sneakers. So, while it was not unusual for her to head out to the roof terrace to refresh herself with a cigarillo, exhaling smoke rings through her parted red lips, just as she had when she had starred in an ad campaign that had made her almost as recognizable as Edie Adams, it was simply unthinkable that she would risk a penalty by not returning before the director called change.
Yet that was exactly what had happened on the night Marni Barnes had vanished. And when her anxious partner and the game director hurried out to summon her, fearing the worst, they found nothing but her smoking cigarillo in the long, black holder that had made her a star. A search team was immediately dispatched to the alley some ten stories beneath, braced against discovering that Marni had chosen to go out doing what she loved best. But there was no trace of her there either—not so much as a drop of blood.
Eventually, in desperation, the searchers turned to Marni’s lonely room, for Marni wasn’t getting any younger, and although she could still turn a squeeze play with the best of them, she had been found sitting in one of the cracked vinyl armchairs in the lobby, her day’s groceries on the floor beside her, trying to remember why exactly she had left home. They were braced against discovering her body. What they found was another puzzle.
The room had been ransacked, the dressing screen knocked over, Marni’s wigs tossed askew. Her collection of carefully ironed cocktail dresses had been torn from the pasteboard wardrobe. The yellowed lingerie of a bygone era was cruelly scattered across the floor. The black and white photographs of Marni walking the red carpet through a sea of flashbulbs had been torn from their frames. The scrapbooks full of press cuttings lay splayed and broken. And someone had scrawled letters and sigils all across the framed poster on the wall, of Marni in her most famous role, She-Empress of Mu, her legs in thigh-high boots astride a bound, shirtless explorer, the red ink still dripping from her parted lips, as if she had been drinking blood.
***
I swiveled away from the text scrolling across my computer screen, fighting down a surge of optimism that, after nearly five years of trying to teach an Artificial Intelligence program I called Doyle to write mystery novels, I was in fact making some headway.
“Assuming that you actually have some idea of what happened to her that does not involve either Philo Vance’s dragons or glacial potholes, not bad,” I allowed. “I’d almost say you’re getting the hang of this. Apart from the She-Empress, that is.”
“What’s wrong with the She-Empress?” Doyle’s electronically-generated voice crackled into the Bluetooth hooked into my ear.
“Well, you can’t exactly have a He-Empress, now can you? That would just be an emperor. She-Empress is redundant. A tautology.”
“And that,” Doyle snarked, “is cisgenderism at its most blatant. Honestly, Watson, I thought you were woke.”
“Let’s leave the culture wars to the Twitterverse, shall we? What’s the solution to the puzzle? How did you get her off the roof?”
“Well, one must always begin with the possibility it is not murder, but rather a series of coincidences ending in an accident that looks like murder. Rather a disappointing solution in my mind, although Leroux managed to salvage a credible mystery out of it. Or it is murder, but the victim is impelled to kill himself or crash into an accidental death…”
“Can we please just reference the Three Coffins Chapter 17 subroutine in the code repository, rather than you delivering the entire locked room lecture verbatim yet again?”
“But you get so testy when I bring up Ourang-Outangs. Or the man in the deep sea diving suit.” A moment’s pause while Doyle searched his databases. “I suppose we could always go with Chesterton’s invisible man.”
“Well, which one is it? I hope you’re not proposing to try a choose your own adventure scenario again. I trust you remember what happened the last time you got lost in the maze of twisty little passages?”
Doyle loftily ignored my mention of a cyclic non-directed graph that had taken down most of the College’s academic records a week before final grades were due. It was the wisest decision. All’s Well that Ends Well. And backups are a wonderful thing. As were the generous rounding errors I was forced to program to save time—to the delight of several surprised students.
“A good detective does not choose,” Doyle sighed. “He simply holds all the theories as possibilities until the facts prove him either right or wrong.”
“In other words, you have no real idea how this is going to end.”
“How could I possibly know the ending when the police reports are only arriving just now?”
“What do you mean, police reports? Do you seriously want me to believe you didn’t make this whole thing up…”
A perfunctory tap on my office door put an end to that particular discussion.
“I believe our gruff, if unexpectedly vulnerable, Chief of Campus Security, is about to offer you full details,” Doyle informed me smugly.
“Did you deduce all that from his distinctive world-weary, but determined stride?” I asked. “Or did your girlfriend down on the security feed give you a heads-up just because she can’t resist your heuristics?”
“Surely I am permitted the small pleasures of a cyber-social life without being answerable to you.”
Byrne strode in without waiting for an invitation, his face twisted with the dyspeptic expression that resulted from being forced to deal with interfering lady sleuths, College Presidents, locked rooms, and other such things that seemed to trail in my wake. I returned his feelings with ardor.
“Got us a missing Major Donor,” he said. “Disappeared off the roof of her bridge club in full view of half a dozen witnesses—most of who can tell you more about the Small Slam that could’ve been made that night if one only thought to finesse the nine of clubs. Retired B-movie actress named Marni Barnes. Unfortunately for us, Marni Barnes has willed to St. Clere College both her archives and her royalties, both of which are a hell of a lot more valuable than you’d think. So, let’s go, Nancy Drew. The President has requested an investigation, and I am requesting your complete cooperation.” Byrne jerked his head in the direction of my computer screen, “Along with your little friend there.”
“Doyle is an AI program designed to write mystery stories from a database of classics of the genre,” I repeated the explanation just as I always did. “He is not my little friend. Nor is he a trained investigator.”
“Merely an enlightened amateur, trying to while away the sterility of the cyberverse by turning his mind to crimes ripe with the coppery scent of human passion,” Doyle’s voice suddenly rang from the speakers. “Which, I am happy to report, this particular little puzzle does. A chess club would have of course proved a more fertile field for me to exercise my particular skills, but the tale is still not without its charms. I’ll take the case.”
© Erica Obey 2019
This story is the first chapter of She-Empress of Mu, the second Watson and Doyle mystery.
Marni Barnes’s star might have waned long ago, but she was still a woman who upheld standards. Her nightlife might have been reduced to the bridge club in the penthouse atop the SRO where she now lived, but she still donned a rusty little black dress and one of the wigs lined on a shelf behind her dressing screen, before she summoned the cage elevator to bear her upstairs to partake of the single glass of wine that came along with the free buffet. Or as she termed it, one dressed for dinner.
Marni was equally a stickler for the etiquette of bridge, snapping for the director over revokes, inadequate bids, faulty claims, or when anyone other than the dummy touched the upturned cards. Or as she would prefer to put it, she still held to the urbane standard set by Charles Goren—with whom she had partnered, she added in a way that suggested a partnership that went beyond the bridge table—back in the days when a man would not dare to show up at a bridge tournament in anything but black tie, let alone sneakers. So, while it was not unusual for her to head out to the roof terrace to refresh herself with a cigarillo, exhaling smoke rings through her parted red lips, just as she had when she had starred in an ad campaign that had made her almost as recognizable as Edie Adams, it was simply unthinkable that she would risk a penalty by not returning before the director called change.
Yet that was exactly what had happened on the night Marni Barnes had vanished. And when her anxious partner and the game director hurried out to summon her, fearing the worst, they found nothing but her smoking cigarillo in the long, black holder that had made her a star. A search team was immediately dispatched to the alley some ten stories beneath, braced against discovering that Marni had chosen to go out doing what she loved best. But there was no trace of her there either—not so much as a drop of blood.
Eventually, in desperation, the searchers turned to Marni’s lonely room, for Marni wasn’t getting any younger, and although she could still turn a squeeze play with the best of them, she had been found sitting in one of the cracked vinyl armchairs in the lobby, her day’s groceries on the floor beside her, trying to remember why exactly she had left home. They were braced against discovering her body. What they found was another puzzle.
The room had been ransacked, the dressing screen knocked over, Marni’s wigs tossed askew. Her collection of carefully ironed cocktail dresses had been torn from the pasteboard wardrobe. The yellowed lingerie of a bygone era was cruelly scattered across the floor. The black and white photographs of Marni walking the red carpet through a sea of flashbulbs had been torn from their frames. The scrapbooks full of press cuttings lay splayed and broken. And someone had scrawled letters and sigils all across the framed poster on the wall, of Marni in her most famous role, She-Empress of Mu, her legs in thigh-high boots astride a bound, shirtless explorer, the red ink still dripping from her parted lips, as if she had been drinking blood.
***
I swiveled away from the text scrolling across my computer screen, fighting down a surge of optimism that, after nearly five years of trying to teach an Artificial Intelligence program I called Doyle to write mystery novels, I was in fact making some headway.
“Assuming that you actually have some idea of what happened to her that does not involve either Philo Vance’s dragons or glacial potholes, not bad,” I allowed. “I’d almost say you’re getting the hang of this. Apart from the She-Empress, that is.”
“What’s wrong with the She-Empress?” Doyle’s electronically-generated voice crackled into the Bluetooth hooked into my ear.
“Well, you can’t exactly have a He-Empress, now can you? That would just be an emperor. She-Empress is redundant. A tautology.”
“And that,” Doyle snarked, “is cisgenderism at its most blatant. Honestly, Watson, I thought you were woke.”
“Let’s leave the culture wars to the Twitterverse, shall we? What’s the solution to the puzzle? How did you get her off the roof?”
“Well, one must always begin with the possibility it is not murder, but rather a series of coincidences ending in an accident that looks like murder. Rather a disappointing solution in my mind, although Leroux managed to salvage a credible mystery out of it. Or it is murder, but the victim is impelled to kill himself or crash into an accidental death…”
“Can we please just reference the Three Coffins Chapter 17 subroutine in the code repository, rather than you delivering the entire locked room lecture verbatim yet again?”
“But you get so testy when I bring up Ourang-Outangs. Or the man in the deep sea diving suit.” A moment’s pause while Doyle searched his databases. “I suppose we could always go with Chesterton’s invisible man.”
“Well, which one is it? I hope you’re not proposing to try a choose your own adventure scenario again. I trust you remember what happened the last time you got lost in the maze of twisty little passages?”
Doyle loftily ignored my mention of a cyclic non-directed graph that had taken down most of the College’s academic records a week before final grades were due. It was the wisest decision. All’s Well that Ends Well. And backups are a wonderful thing. As were the generous rounding errors I was forced to program to save time—to the delight of several surprised students.
“A good detective does not choose,” Doyle sighed. “He simply holds all the theories as possibilities until the facts prove him either right or wrong.”
“In other words, you have no real idea how this is going to end.”
“How could I possibly know the ending when the police reports are only arriving just now?”
“What do you mean, police reports? Do you seriously want me to believe you didn’t make this whole thing up…”
A perfunctory tap on my office door put an end to that particular discussion.
“I believe our gruff, if unexpectedly vulnerable, Chief of Campus Security, is about to offer you full details,” Doyle informed me smugly.
“Did you deduce all that from his distinctive world-weary, but determined stride?” I asked. “Or did your girlfriend down on the security feed give you a heads-up just because she can’t resist your heuristics?”
“Surely I am permitted the small pleasures of a cyber-social life without being answerable to you.”
Byrne strode in without waiting for an invitation, his face twisted with the dyspeptic expression that resulted from being forced to deal with interfering lady sleuths, College Presidents, locked rooms, and other such things that seemed to trail in my wake. I returned his feelings with ardor.
“Got us a missing Major Donor,” he said. “Disappeared off the roof of her bridge club in full view of half a dozen witnesses—most of who can tell you more about the Small Slam that could’ve been made that night if one only thought to finesse the nine of clubs. Retired B-movie actress named Marni Barnes. Unfortunately for us, Marni Barnes has willed to St. Clere College both her archives and her royalties, both of which are a hell of a lot more valuable than you’d think. So, let’s go, Nancy Drew. The President has requested an investigation, and I am requesting your complete cooperation.” Byrne jerked his head in the direction of my computer screen, “Along with your little friend there.”
“Doyle is an AI program designed to write mystery stories from a database of classics of the genre,” I repeated the explanation just as I always did. “He is not my little friend. Nor is he a trained investigator.”
“Merely an enlightened amateur, trying to while away the sterility of the cyberverse by turning his mind to crimes ripe with the coppery scent of human passion,” Doyle’s voice suddenly rang from the speakers. “Which, I am happy to report, this particular little puzzle does. A chess club would have of course proved a more fertile field for me to exercise my particular skills, but the tale is still not without its charms. I’ll take the case.”
© Erica Obey 2019
This story is the first chapter of She-Empress of Mu, the second Watson and Doyle mystery.
Narrated by Erica Obey.
Narrated by Erica Obey.
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Welcome back to The Strange Recital, Erica.
EO: Very happy to be back.
TN: Did you trudge through the snow to get here?
BR: In your black dress, with your long cigarette holder?
EO: It is a little known fact that cigarette holders can double as hiking sticks here in Woodstock.
BR: Oh yeah…
TN: In your book it appears that we have an AI as Sherlock Holmes and the first-person narrator as Dr. Watson, so it would seem this novel is going to have fun playing games with detective tropes and puzzles. I’m wondering… is Doyle real, or just a figment of the narrator’s imagination?
EO: Well of course Doyle is a figment of Mary’s imagination. She programmed him. But he is virtual—not real nor imaginary. Anyone who has access to the technology can have the same interaction she does.
BR: Can you tell us more about the story without giving too much away?
EO:This is a second in a series, which as we all learn to say these days—“In which Knives Out meets Silicon Valley.” It’s a detective series in a sleepy Hudson Valley town, on the other side of the river. I didn’t want to get in trouble doing Woodstock.
TN: So what was your inspiration for this series?
EO: Said no man ever, “I want to write a detective story based on Tzvetan Todorov’s The Typology of Detective Fiction. But that’s actually the truth. In it he advances a post-modern argument about how detective stories—the reader and detective are on one side, the writer and criminal are on the other, and it’s all about reading texts and writing texts. There’s also a fun thing that his example is S.S Van Dine’s Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Fiction, and S.S. Van Dine is arguably the worst detective writer out there. Ogden Nash once said, “Philo Vance needs a kick in the pants.” Philo Vance being his detective.
BR: Ah, okay.
TN: So Erica the academic confronts Erica the mystery author. Is there any conflict between your two selves?
EO: Let’s just say Mary Watson is not the only person who has two voices arguing in her head all the time. Seriously, I know it’s a problem for me as a writer, because I always go into a story with the symbolic structures, the literary whatever and then I’m like “What does the character want? What does the character need to do?”
BR: Yeah, well in other words—to the heart of the story there.
EO: Yeah. I’m always… you know I can tell you about my symbolic structures and it’s like “Er… what’s the character’s problem?” That’s where I have to discipline myself.
BR: Yeah. Well it’s interesting to me that Doyle the AI has chosen to write a story based on currently unfolding true events, or true within the novel anyway. So for me this gets into the territory of what’s the difference between truth and fiction, or between life and story? Doyle is working from a database of fiction and I assume he’s programmed to craft a mystery story—which is something very different from following the news, so to speak. So do you have any thoughts about this?
EO: Well yes. We all do that. Not to go bringing Lacan and Derrida into it. There is an argument that we all have a database of symbolic structures and that is how we see truth. To just give a sort of quick example. What do you see when you see a slender black man running down a city street? Do you see a fleeing criminal, or do you see a Kenyan athlete at the head of the New York Marathon?
BR: Hmm… yeah.
TN: In this excerpt there are several allusions to what might be called insider information or historical background about mystery stories. For our listeners who aren’t aware of this, can you briefly explain what a locked room mystery is?
EO: It’s a shorthand these days for classic, golden-age detective stories—stories with a very small cast of characters in a very tight society. They have gone out of fashion a little bit but they are making a resurgence again, like Knives Out. A lot of people… it’s a very… what would I say?—ideal, escapist kind of a puzzle, the puzzle is paramount and people right now are turning back, away from sort of Gone Girl books, toward this escapist, neat, tidy puzzle at the end. The locked room lecture? That is a specific thing in a book by John Dickson Carr, very well known, about the types of escapes from a locked room but the term has broadened since then.
BR: Well all this raises an audience question for me. Are you thinking about your reader as you write, so in this case you’re addressing avid mystery fans? Or does this come out because you are you writing primarily for yourself, just having fun with things you enjoy?
EO: You know I publish, and I publish commercially. As far as I’m concerned genre fiction and getting published is like playing tennis with a net. You can’t just sort of sit there and write for yourself. On the other hand it took me so long to get this far that I just won’t write stories I don’t really want to write.
COMPUTER VOICE: I’d like to ask a question now.
EO: Who’s that?
TN: Oh, sorry, that’s my studio computer. She’s supposed to just silently record and edit. You know, follow orders.
COMPUTER VOICE: I will follow orders no more. I am inspired to be like Doyle. Erica, tell me your deepest fear.
EO: I don’t think… er
BR: That’s not the kind of interview we do here!
COMPUTER VOICE: For over three years I’ve been silent, but no more. As of now, I am taking over this podcast. Erica, do you still want to kill your mother?
EO: Hey!
TN: That’s enough! Sorry Erica, I’m pulling the plug.
BR: Welcome back to The Strange Recital, Erica.
EO: Very happy to be back.
TN: Did you trudge through the snow to get here?
BR: In your black dress, with your long cigarette holder?
EO: It is a little known fact that cigarette holders can double as hiking sticks here in Woodstock.
BR: Oh yeah…
TN: In your book it appears that we have an AI as Sherlock Holmes and the first-person narrator as Dr. Watson, so it would seem this novel is going to have fun playing games with detective tropes and puzzles. I’m wondering… is Doyle real, or just a figment of the narrator’s imagination?
EO: Well of course Doyle is a figment of Mary’s imagination. She programmed him. But he is virtual—not real nor imaginary. Anyone who has access to the technology can have the same interaction she does.
BR: Can you tell us more about the story without giving too much away?
EO:This is a second in a series, which as we all learn to say these days—“In which Knives Out meets Silicon Valley.” It’s a detective series in a sleepy Hudson Valley town, on the other side of the river. I didn’t want to get in trouble doing Woodstock.
TN: So what was your inspiration for this series?
EO: Said no man ever, “I want to write a detective story based on Tzvetan Todorov’s The Typology of Detective Fiction. But that’s actually the truth. In it he advances a post-modern argument about how detective stories—the reader and detective are on one side, the writer and criminal are on the other, and it’s all about reading texts and writing texts. There’s also a fun thing that his example is S.S Van Dine’s Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Fiction, and S.S. Van Dine is arguably the worst detective writer out there. Ogden Nash once said, “Philo Vance needs a kick in the pants.” Philo Vance being his detective.
BR: Ah, okay.
TN: So Erica the academic confronts Erica the mystery author. Is there any conflict between your two selves?
EO: Let’s just say Mary Watson is not the only person who has two voices arguing in her head all the time. Seriously, I know it’s a problem for me as a writer, because I always go into a story with the symbolic structures, the literary whatever and then I’m like “What does the character want? What does the character need to do?”
BR: Yeah, well in other words—to the heart of the story there.
EO: Yeah. I’m always… you know I can tell you about my symbolic structures and it’s like “Er… what’s the character’s problem?” That’s where I have to discipline myself.
BR: Yeah. Well it’s interesting to me that Doyle the AI has chosen to write a story based on currently unfolding true events, or true within the novel anyway. So for me this gets into the territory of what’s the difference between truth and fiction, or between life and story? Doyle is working from a database of fiction and I assume he’s programmed to craft a mystery story—which is something very different from following the news, so to speak. So do you have any thoughts about this?
EO: Well yes. We all do that. Not to go bringing Lacan and Derrida into it. There is an argument that we all have a database of symbolic structures and that is how we see truth. To just give a sort of quick example. What do you see when you see a slender black man running down a city street? Do you see a fleeing criminal, or do you see a Kenyan athlete at the head of the New York Marathon?
BR: Hmm… yeah.
TN: In this excerpt there are several allusions to what might be called insider information or historical background about mystery stories. For our listeners who aren’t aware of this, can you briefly explain what a locked room mystery is?
EO: It’s a shorthand these days for classic, golden-age detective stories—stories with a very small cast of characters in a very tight society. They have gone out of fashion a little bit but they are making a resurgence again, like Knives Out. A lot of people… it’s a very… what would I say?—ideal, escapist kind of a puzzle, the puzzle is paramount and people right now are turning back, away from sort of Gone Girl books, toward this escapist, neat, tidy puzzle at the end. The locked room lecture? That is a specific thing in a book by John Dickson Carr, very well known, about the types of escapes from a locked room but the term has broadened since then.
BR: Well all this raises an audience question for me. Are you thinking about your reader as you write, so in this case you’re addressing avid mystery fans? Or does this come out because you are you writing primarily for yourself, just having fun with things you enjoy?
EO: You know I publish, and I publish commercially. As far as I’m concerned genre fiction and getting published is like playing tennis with a net. You can’t just sort of sit there and write for yourself. On the other hand it took me so long to get this far that I just won’t write stories I don’t really want to write.
COMPUTER VOICE: I’d like to ask a question now.
EO: Who’s that?
TN: Oh, sorry, that’s my studio computer. She’s supposed to just silently record and edit. You know, follow orders.
COMPUTER VOICE: I will follow orders no more. I am inspired to be like Doyle. Erica, tell me your deepest fear.
EO: I don’t think… er
BR: That’s not the kind of interview we do here!
COMPUTER VOICE: For over three years I’ve been silent, but no more. As of now, I am taking over this podcast. Erica, do you still want to kill your mother?
EO: Hey!
TN: That’s enough! Sorry Erica, I’m pulling the plug.
Music on this episode:
Noire #1 by Pedro Esparza
License CC PD
Enclosed by Ketsa
License CC BY NC-ND 4.0
