Writer Commentary: Dead Man’s Safe

Here we are with Dead Man’s Safe, the last of the three episodes I wrote back in 2019 when I originally had the idea for Roy Kaplan (then simply Out of Sight). Dead Man’s Safe was the second episode I ever wrote, after Bomber Blackout and before Murder by Proxy.

I don’t remember exactly the inspiration for this episode. I think part of it was a joke in a webcomic about how in the future .pdfs would be antiquated and there wouldn’t be any way to read them. I thought that in the cyberpunk future hundreds of years from now, how many people would recognize old analog technologies? Even now there’s hardly anyone who knows offhand what a dictograph is, and people who think of phonographs nowadays are more likely to picture vinyl records than the cylinders that were originally used. So I thought it would be interesting to have a piece of data stored in a format so antiquated that the layman can’t even recognize it as data.

I think that the other inspiration for this episode was that I wanted a case where Wes’s personal knowledge of the past was critical to solving the case. Even as wide as Roy’s background knowledge tends to be, he can’t recognize a phonograph cylinder, but Wes, who grew up in that time, certainly could. Obviously I can’t have Roy picking up cases all over the place where knowledge about the 20th century is relevant, but there should be at least one, and that one is this one.

The tagline for this episode in my notes is “theft and murder” (most of my episode plans start from something simple like that). I was writing this episode at a time when I had a lot of Philip Marlowe and Richard Diamond on the mind, and the convention of those stories is for there to be a body count basically no matter what case it starts out as. I mention this mostly because “detective goes to follow up on a potential lead and the lead is dead when they get there” is a beat that comes up a lot in hardboiled pulps, while Roy Kaplan as a series is relatively light on the murders (relative being the operative term, since there’s on average less than one murder per episode while most pulps from that era average at least one murder per installment). I don’t think I’d necessarily change anything about the setup for this episode if I were to write it now–a theft isn’t enough to carry an episode all on its own, so there’s got to be something spicy like a murder to make it more interesting.

I knew from the outset that I wanted the secret in Oswald’s safe to be something completely unrelated to Tara’s past crimes–not just because I think someone believing they’ve been betrayed and committing a murder over it and realizing later they had jumped to murdery conclusions is interesting, but also because it’s just bad storytelling. It would be really boring to have Roy reveal that he knows Tara murdered her ex-husband for the money, then play a message in which we learn she murdered her ex-husband for money. You can only drop a bomb once–if I wanted the cylinder to be about Tara’s crimes, I would have to write the episode so that Roy deduced from other evidence why Tara had committed the murders, then reveal with the cylinder the exact nature of the secret she was trying to hide (that she had murdered her ex-husband etc). That’s just the mechanical side of storytelling more than a purely creative choice.

I admit that I’m not satisfied with the secret on Oswald’s cylinder. I put the whole “you have a sister that I’ve tried and failed to find” thing on there as a placeholder because that’s all I could think of at the time, and then never thought of anything better to put on the confession instead. Well, it’s too late to change it now even if I do think of something better.

Dead Man’s Safe is not the first time we have seen Inspector Fletcher, but it is the first time I wrote her. You really need to decide early on your detective’s relationship with law enforcement–the scale runs from Philip Marlowe who regularly experiences police brutality to Richard Diamond who’s literally best friends with the homicide lieutenant, and Roy falls more towards the hostile end. He’s not getting worked over by the garda, but he’s definitely not reaching out to them for assistance or to use their resources, either. Not to mention his literal criminal past as a prolific burglar. Fletcher and Roy have some begrudging respect for each other, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re friends, especially when Roy goes out of his way to be extremely annoying to her. If we go on to future seasons, I don’t expect that to change much.

The other thing that’s kind of been shifted because of the reordering of the episodes is the mention of glove prints–last week in Bait and Stitch, we got to hear about the issue of glove prints, which are obviously not as incriminating as fingerprints but still a thing that can point to a culprit. In the original order I’d written these episodes, Dead Man’s Safe was second and Bait and Stitch was fourth, so we got to have the concept of glove prints brought up as incriminating evidence before having Locke barge into Roy’s office and say that someone’s going to frame her with a set of her gloves (and by extension, learning about Roy’s gloves that don’t make reproducible prints). It wasn’t an important enough sequence for us to move Dead Man’s Safe back up the episode order, compared to learning more about Roy’s past and kicking off the season 1 plot thread, but it’s something I had to think about.

Anyways, I don’t know how much people care about this, but I’ll put it on the record for future reference: one credit is equivalent to about 15 USD. Do with that information what you will.

That’s all I’ve got for now. See you next time!