"If you're looking for an entertaining and innovative three-week diversion, "The Daughters of Freya" might be just the pastime for you ... What makes it so much fun is the surprising way it puts you smack into the lives of the characters." - Marietta Dunn, Philadelphia Inquirer
OPEN EMAIL FOR THE NEXT CHAPTER: You've got e-mystery.By Marietta Dunn
Philadelphia Inquirer
If you're looking for an entertaining and innovative three-week diversion, and if you have a computer, The Daughters of Freya - written by two longtime friends, Michael Betcherman, a Toronto author and filmmaker, and David Diamond, a California author and journalist - might be just the pastime for you. It's a "real-time" mystery, written as e-mails between the characters, and sent, in four or five short daily installments, to your in-box. The story starts when you subscribe - sort of the high-tech equivalent of a serialized novelette.
The mystery itself is pretty straightforward. Simone, the charismatic leader of a California cult known as the Daughters of Freya, claims that it is dedicated to bringing about world peace through sexual encounters. Hmmm. Or could it possibly be a front for a pricey prostitution ring? A middle-aged journalist, Samantha Dempsey, sets out to investigate after a friend's daughter is brainwashed by the cult into doling out sexual favors. Chasing the story gives Samantha a breather from her shaky marriage, and a chance to hone her long-dormant investigative skills. Of course, it also leads her into all kinds of intrigue, including the hunt for a murderer among the West Coast's high-flying technological entrepreneurs.
Daughters isn't written in the most profound prose; these are e-mails, for heaven's sake: sometimes just a sentence or two, sometimes a longer discourse, occasionally some hurried lines peppered with misspellings.
But Daughters isn't meant to be great writing. What makes it so much fun, other than the pleasure of logging on every day and finding that you have mail, is the surprising way it puts you smack into the lives of Samantha, her family, and the myriad other characters, without plot, exposition or dialogue. Everything you learn about them - about husbands who spend too much time on the road, about ailing parents, wayward children, and dicey business dealings - you learn through the e-mails that fly between them. Sometimes it's like eavesdropping on friends' chatter, from the mundane to the deeply personal. And many of these e-mail conversations, no matter how irrelevant they seem to the plot, generate a considerable amount of tension, as well as insights into the e-mailer's state of mind.
At first, it might seem odd that the characters' personalities could be so clearly defined by their e-mails. But when you think about it, it's really not so strange. After all, how much about our own lives, our own fears and feelings, do we set down in our e-mails to friends and family? How many secrets do we reveal, even knowing that our privacy could be easily compromised?
As an "e-mystery," The Daughters of Freya takes advantage of countless technical tricks to keep readers engaged. It uses hyperlinks to send readers to other sites: to the history of Freya, the Norse goddess of sexuality; to pictures of various "suspects"; to Samantha's articles about the cult that appear in a fictional magazine and newspaper. Samantha's articles also generate a series of e-mail responses from "the public" that are passed along to Daughters subscribers. Even e-mail addresses and headers contain clues and information that propel the story - without taking note of them, for example, there would be no way to know that Samantha is using a detective agency to run checks on license plates of possible "johns."
Betcherman says the "e-pistolary" format the writers chose "was tailor-made for a mystery.... It would allow us to take advantage of one of the more insidious aspects of the Internet - you never really know who's on the other end of the e-mail."
Once he and Diamond had a solid draft of their story, he says, they recruited test e-mail readers, and "in the middle of the mystery, the readers were sending unsolicited e-mails saying they were hooked... . We thought we were either onto something, or that we knew a lot of very polite people."
After months of working out the technical kinks of the Web site and the delivery technology, the writers launched their "e-book" in October in Toronto at Bouchercon, the international mystery writers' conference. Betcherman says they are "now well into the four figures" in terms of subscribers.
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