Back To the Old Drawing Board

Well, I've sent the manuscript from the first novel to scads of agents, and not one has asked to see it, so I can only assume that it's not going to get published. At least not this year. I'll keep sending it out as I find new agents who are willing to look at it, but I think it's time to move on to new projects. I began working on a new story last week. The working title will be Much Possessed by Death. The story is set over 1,000 years in the future. Earth has known nothing but unparallelled peace and prosperity for over 900 years. All things like poverty, disease, hunger, and crime have been eliminated. No on has been murdered in all of that time. Police, though they do exist, serve largely in a community service capacity, "you walked around your appointed area, poked your head into shops, made friendly with the residents, gave pep talks to the kiddies, that sort of thing." One day, Commander Gershom Thayer of the International Police Force is interrupted while reading T. S. Eliot and called to the World Commissioner's office and informed that there has been a murder, and the he's been assigned to solve it as quickly and quietly as possible. Trouble is that Thayer has no idea how to solve a crime. He's assigned a team consisting of a brutish and none too smart beat cop, a newly minted constable, an aging and lazy detective and a doctor with a morbid curiosity in the ancient art of forensic medicine. Armed only with 21st century TV shows to show them how police solve crimes, Gershom and his team set out to discover who butchered one of Earth's best known astronauts his wife in their bedroom and why. As their investigation advances, they uncover secret organizations that deal in vice for a price, and they find that Earth's culture is not quite as Utopian as they had thought. Well, that's the story line. I hope to have the first draft completed in about six weeks. I'll keep y'all posted on the progress.