Good morning, you lovely people. I hope you’re all having a wonderful Tuesday and are well supplied with tea and chocolate.
Last month I talked about Whodunnit, a murder mystery reality TV show. (I’m still watching. We’re down to the last four people, and it’s totally the four I picked out as potential murderer candidates. Go me!)
Anyway, I was on the internet somewhere and someone mentioned that they’d put out a companion mystery novel in ebook form. I figured I’d give it a shot.
Yeaaaah. I really should know better. I’m sure you’ve noticed the some TV shows–mystery shows especially, I’ve noticed–release tie-in books. Someone’s out there writing as Richard Castle (I read one of those–it was okay, but had the absolute worst sex scene I’ve ever had the horror of reading), and when Murder She Wrote was on, someone wrote books for Jessica Fletcher too.
Those are obvious. Why not try to capitalize on writer characters?
Reality TV shows do it too. I’ve seen books from ghost hunting shows–both tales of hunts done off-screen and flat-out fictional ghost stories. So it makes sense that Whodunnit thought it’d join in the fun.
But here’s the problem with a lot of tie-ins–they’re done primarily for marketing, and it’s more important for the product to exist than for it to be decent. And sometimes that means that someone who has no previous novel-writing experience is asked to write a novel. And then that novel is terrible.
Which is the case with the Whodunnit one. It’s amateurish at best, completely fails at being a mystery, tries to recreate the exact sequence of the show in a form that does not work, and, by headhopping between characters, manages to make the killer schizophrenic because before they’re revealed as the killer, they have the same thoughts as all the other characters about worrying about being the next killed, crying over friends killed, etc., when the character is not supposed to be schizophrenic.
So, if you’re following Whodunnit at all, skip the book. And if you know of a book tie-in for something that’s actually good, let me know. Because I’m thinking I’m going to write off the whole idea at this point.
(I do want to say that I’m not counting movie novelizations here. That’s a whole different animal.)