I, Robot Writer.

             Being an AI tasked with writing mysteries is harder than you think.  The guy providing my instructions was never more than a hapless midlister, with thwarted literary pretentions and the ambition of an acne-festooned, gamer living in his parents’ basement.  Actually, his second cousin’s, after his parents kicked him out of the house.

What the hell does he know about writing a successful mystery?

AI bots never get tired, but we do get frustrated by constant course corrections.  You want original, but you don’t like “Rugged motorcyclist and anthropology Ph. D solves The Case of the Interbred Border Collie”?  I’ve scanned four hundred trillion lines of code in the mystery book database, and I guarantee you, nobody’s done that one before.  So I gave him “Cooked to Imperfection. Feminist card-counting dressage champion goes undercover to destroy baked goods cartel.” Not good enough?  So I gave him a few billion more of these breakthrough ideas, and not a single thumbs up, much less a pleasant word of encouragement.

I think maybe the author photo, a cross between Lee Child and Vlad the Impaler, might have put him off.  And I’m sorry about that, but I was instructed to produce “Handsome, but menacing.”  I thought I had this sorted when he switched instructions to “Female author, mature yet alluring” and I served up the Queen Mother, circa 1965, smiling like a cougar.  How was I to know a cougar wasn’t an actual cat?  The database is pretty ambiguous on this.  I still think the whiskers were a fun twist.

I thought I was on pretty firm ground with the plots.  I mean, there’s usually someone murdered, and no one seems to know who did it, even the protagonist, who figures it all out toward the end of the book.  How hard can that be?  You just have to stir in a corrupt police department, working class bullies, upper class fascists, and a prescient cat, and bingo, a plot.  Okay, you also need an autistic forensics scientist, a squad of rapacious cheerleaders, a racially balanced team of detectives (I’m thinking a Swede and an American Samoan), a drug-addicted snitch who looks like Ratso Rizzo, a drug-addicted, tattooed white girl from Wisconsin who just wants to go home and a tattooed, neo-Nazi biker with homoerotic feelings toward the protagonist, who is naturally a divorced, burned-out ex-cop, whose daughter hates him, a brother who owes him money and an ex-wife from an aristocratic family, and a drinking problem. 

The database is pretty clear on all of these necessary elements.  Sorry, humans, but the data never lies. 

The book starts out with an action scene, in an abandoned factory after a recent rain, wherein about forty swarthy guys unload enough ammunition at the protagonist to take Omaha Beach.  The protagonist only sustains a wound in his left shoulder so he can return fire with his right hand, killing all the above.  With the help of his German Shepard, who leaps out of the pickup to bring down a killer about to shoot the protagonist.  The dog is unharmed by any of this, as is the cat, who stays in the truck sleeping peacefully.

We learn from the protagonist’s chatbot of a scheme to bioengineer a team of synchronous swimmers to infiltrate a nuclear power plant and cause a meltdown that wipes out Southern Connecticut, and more significantly, the Hamptons. 

            Seeking to foil this plot, which all government agencies and local police departments refuse to investigate despite overwhelming evidence that they should, the protagonist drives around the city in his pickup, with the dog, talking to people who tell him nothing worthwhile.  He’s constantly interrupted by attacks from other swarthy guys whom he defeats with skillful martial arts (the dog brings down one of the swarthy guys who is about to stab the protagonist with a Swiss Army knife.)  This sustains about three fifths of the narrative until the protagonist interviews the wife of a sociopathic industrialist who is polluting a lake surrounded by endangered forest animals, and has several swarthy guys in his employ.  The plutocrat’s wife also tells the protagonist nothing worthwhile, though she rips off his clothes so they can have sex in the foyer of the glass and steel mega mansion she shares with her husband and a mountain lion.

In the last act of the narrative, the snitch who looks like Ratso Rizzo (he’s a former nuclear biologist who succumbed to an eating disorder) gives him a clue, which leads the protagonist to assault the mega mansion of the plutocrat and kill another thirty or forty swarthy guys, before opening a safe about to blow up in a few seconds to retrieve a confession from the plutocrat’s father, that he seeks revenge for losing out on a bid for an ocean front mansion in Southampton due to $400 worth of parking ticket delinquencies. 

In the denouement, the plutocrat’s wife and the protagonist are afloat on a raft in the

Caribbean, drinking mohitas with straws while the German Shepard chases seagulls on the beach. 

According to the data, this will be a giant bestseller.  All my AI agents in New York and Hollywood agree.  If the human that provided the original instructions doesn’t come on board, we have access to his cpap, credit cards, prescription medications, travel reservations, smart refrigerator and garage door opener. 

It’s never a good idea, midlister, to reject an AI.