Hello!
Welcome to the blog series where I (the writer) write commentary on each episode of Roy Kaplan. These are all written with the assumption that you’ve listened to the episode (and the ones preceding), so if you haven’t listened to (or read the transcript for) Bomber Blackout, check it out here!
With that out of the way, let’s get started.
Bomber Blackout has a special place in my heart, because it’s the first script I wrote for Out of Sight, back when the entire show was called Out of Sight instead of just being subtitled that. I wrote it in February of 2019, around the time I was listening to a lot of Richard Diamond, Private Investigator. I have a blog post talking more about the history of Roy Kaplan in general, but the brief version is that I originally had the idea to write a series of short stories about a psychic detective who was haunted by a ghost, taking place in the cyberpunk future to give it a little more spice. The actual short story thing fell through pretty fast because the writing felt awkward and I wasn’t enjoying it, and soon after, I decided that this idea would be better suited to a radio drama format.
It’s one of my main writing principles that, especially with genre fiction, you have to present your premise as soon as humanly possible so everyone knows what they’re getting. So it was important to lead with an episode that would touch on all the unique elements of the show: the technology elements, Roy’s profession, Roy’s psychic powers, the relationship between him and his ghost roommate Wes, and alluding to the post-apocalypse closed-city setting. Because of that, Bomber Blackout, back when it was written and later when we shuffled the episode order to clean up the overall pacing, was always going to be our pilot.
I’ve been asked why I included so many different elements, and the answer is: I thought it would be cool. Blending genres and settings lets you mix and match the elements in a lot of different ways, and maybe some people might find including all that a little overstuffed, but I disagree. With a serialized format, you’ve got the space to really stretch out and explore them both individually and in combination the way you wouldn’t in a movie or novel. Noir in particular is a genre I think can be combined with pretty much any other genre, because as long as there’s people, there’s crime. Roy Kaplan is set in a cyberpunk setting largely because the technological factor opens up a much wider variety of crimes, the same way that Roy’s psychic powers open up angles of attack that wouldn’t be possible in say, a Philip Marlowe book. I’m hardly the first person to combine noir and cyberpunk or noir and ghosts–just both of them at the same time (as far as I know).
That being said, I’ve always felt that one of the most compelling elements of the hardboiled story is how down-to-earth the detective solving was. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, hardboiled stories were about crimes being committed for reasons people would actually commit crimes, in ways people would actually commit crimes. They weren’t about committing a crime in the pursuit of “the perfect crime” and a convoluted mystery, but about people with a goal and bashing someone’s head in to get there. That groundedness is something I’ve tried to maintain through all of my stories–even with all the cyberpunk and paranormal elements, people are always people.
Roy is not a genius detective. He’s quick to connect dots, but he’ll never have the Sherlock Holmes-esque deductive reasoning where he knows your personal history from the specific flavor of dirt on your shoes. He has psychic powers and he’s very good at using them, but they’re only helpful in obtaining information and not analyzing it. As such, his investigative methods are mundane–he interviews people (dead people, but people all the same), he digs up evidence (sometimes stolen), and he makes logical connections. Neither his psychic powers nor his access to technology give him the answers–he has to come up with them himself, and his train of logic is one that a listener can reasonably follow.
One of the biggest difficulties I had with writing Bomber Blackout was figuring out how complex the story should be so it would comfortably land at around 30 minutes–not entirely a success, seeing how all the Roy Kaplan episodes tend to fall in the 32-38 minute range. The first draft of the script was at least a few pages longer, and I had to cut some stuff like the use of digital masks and the Baron landing on one of the apartment buildings in Roy’s area or actually seeing Roy con his way into the business tower. It’s not stuff you would notice the absence of in the current iteration, so it’s for the best it’s been cut.
I think when anyone writes a detective story, there’s an urge to make things really complicated so it’s more satisfying when it’s all unraveled. And while detective novels tend to be a certain level of convoluted, short stories hardly need that kind of thing. Especially audio dramas, where it’s not as easy to skip back a few paragraphs to see what happened–you want the story to be intelligible on the first run through. I definitely got a better grasp on how much space I had for complexity as I wrote future episodes.
As for why I chose anti-gravity racing? It’s mostly because I was playing a lot of Redout at the time and I thought it would be cool–I think if you’re writing a story about a post-apocalypse cyberpunk detective who talks to ghosts, “doing cool things” is at least 40% of your forward momentum. It’s more fun to write and read, so why not go for it? It’s also an extremely efficient way to establish that we are in the cyberpunk future without having to say “It’s the cyberpunk future”. There’s not really any deeper reason for it.
In all, I think Bomber Blackout is kind of the distilled essence of Roy Kaplan–it brings together a lot of elements that I wouldn’t be able to combine in a different story, and while it’s not especially in-depth for any of those unique elements, it touches on them and combines them in a way that characterizes the show as a whole. It is, if nothing else, a good introduction to the world and characters and premise of Roy Kaplan, and I hope it’s a good enough showing to convince people to stick around for future episodes.