Origins of The Sixth Precept - Part 4

Finally, “A Concerned Citizen” had been completed and sent out to various markets. I moved on to my next writing project, figuring that would be the last I’d ever imagine about Kim Yoshima. But her character had gotten under my skin (we’d been through so much together, after all!). I actually liked her and decided to write another short piece featuring her. I felt that I hadn’t even scratched the surface of her story. There were more adventures to come.

And so was born the idea for “Detective Story.” Of the four short stories I wrote featuring Kim, this is the most unusual and the only one that was sold (M-Brane SF #3, April, 2009, under the name “Time Noir”). Kim is a featured character but the present tense, first person POV is entirely from an extra-terrestrial being who enlists her to help solve a murder. I don’t remember why I decided to go that route but I’m pleased with how it all came out.

The  alien, going by the the name of “Smith,” is a temporal researcher who’s trying to find out who killed… himself. Can you spell “paradox?” He asks Kim to help him because he’s researched her stellar investigative record and, because he’s been in a human body type for so long, he’s developed feelings of the lustful kind for her. He’s also uses various film-noir and hard-boiled detective phrases throughout like “gams,” “sweetheart,” “get me?,” etc. which eventually gets on Kim’s nerves.

Again, I used a scene from this story in The Sixth Precept. In “Detective Story,” Kim finds an ancient samisen, a guitar-like instrument that geishas used, in an abandoned parking lot, brought to the present from Japan’s medieval past. For the novel, I rewrote that scene from Kim’s POV and, of course, left the alien being out of it.

Shioko (called Kalinda – I really wanted to use that name!) is in this story also, also brought forward in time by random temporal displacement tremors. Plus, this is where Kim first realizes she possesses psychic powers. An editor who rejected this from a particular magazine at the time told me that my opening scene, with an alien, psychic powers and a battle with ninjas out of the past would be confusing to readers. Ha! What did he know?

I ended this with the idea that Kim and Smith would team up in a detective agency with Kim using her psychic powers to solve cases a la Harry Dresden from the “Dresden Files” and John Taylor from the “Nightside” novels. I’m actually considering resurrecting Smith for a subsequent novel or novella. We’ll see.