Digging through an old web site I’m planning to decomission "Real Soon Now," I found a story synopsis that Dave and I came up with some time ago.
It was the mid-90s, The popularity of The X-Files was on the upswing and Angela Lansbury was still solving a new muder every week on Murder, She Wrote. A collision was perhaps inevitable.
I’d been thinking for a while that it was very strange how there was a murder every week in Cabot Cove, and it always happened in such a way that Jessica Fletcher was nearby. Sometimes it was a friend of a friend, once in a while it was someone she knew personally. Even when she went out on book tours, she’d wind up getting involved in the investigation.
I’m no statistician, but it always seemed unlikely that one person would encounter that many murders that frequently. A homicide detective in New York or LA might, but "Mystery Writer" just doesn’t seem the sort of job description where people would be dropping dead around you on a regular basis. Clearly something else was going on.
The idea that something else was going on in Cabot Cove had been bouncing around the inside of my head for a while, so one evening I let the idea out and sent Dave a short email detailing how an FBI agent had been sent to investigate.
Neither Dave nor I watched Murder, She Wrote with any regularity, but he liked my twist on the show well enough that he decided to send it out to the usenet rec.humor.tv newsgroup. (This was, of course, back before the spammers took over usenet.) Evidently there are a few other twisted minds out there, because an anonymous usenet reader wrote back to Dave saying how funny it would be if the FBI agent in question was Fox Mulder.
Dave sent that back to me and the wheels got to turning. Adding Mulder and Scully was simple enough, but even though I’d only seen the first season of The X-Files, it was clear that Mulder and Scully’s appearance couldn’t be anything straight forward. There had to be a twist of some sort.
The story never grew beyond a brief summary with only a few sentences of dialouge, but that’s really all it needed to be. Of course, if one of the studios wants to do something with this, I’m all ears. 🙂
Read Murder, She Caused.