Main Neroin Stix [nɪrwɑn stɪks] series : Neroin Stix : the 12 Strokes
More Neroin Stix short stories :
Novellas (soon readable) :
<aside> 🔪 Series of 12 murder mystery novellas. Status : the first 2 are almost finished.
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It was not the night before Chritsmas. It was the night even before.
The detective Neroin Stix gets a strange phone call. A certain person named Jacques Mart claims 12 murders are going to happen.
12 different days. 12 different hours. 12 different victims. 12 different murderers. 12 different motives. 12 seemingly unrelated cases.
If Jacques Mart isn’t the perpetrator, then how could they know what was about to unfold ? Can one really predict with perfect accuracy all the events of 12 different cases ? Will Neroin and Cassandra be able to prevent the murders or is solving them their only fate ? And most importantly… …who is Jacques Mart ?
With Neroin Stix, I wanted to create a detective who was the opposite of the popular images of crime solving geniuses like Sherlock Holdmes or L Lawliet : high intellect with poor social skills, with the title of world’s greatest detective.
Instead, Neroin’s genius is all in his social skills. He’s able of faking any emotion, changing his perosnnality in a finger snap. He gets all the information he wants from everyday small talk with the suspects without them even knowing that he investigates. Because if Neroin solved famous cold cases, he takes care not to show himself on TV, as being recognised would make his investigations harder. By being anonymous, he can play any role, people put their trust in him, and he ends up backstabbing them by revealing all their secrets at the end.
I didn’t want Neroin to be explicitely lawful good like Hercule Poirot or “sacrifice anything to solve the case” like L Lawliet. But as a consequence of being able to fake any emotion, you can never know if Neroin is honest or not. What is his real personnality ? Is he faking his reactions ? Did he just lie ? What are his morals ? Just how far will he go ? Why drives him ? Is it justice, is it the look of terror of people when he exposes their lies ? It’s all unknown, that’s what’s scary about him. Neroin might be trying to find out who’s the murderer, but you are trying to find out who is Neroin Stix.
<aside> 🔪 Take a look at the Neroin Stix Art Gallery
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🔍Cassandra Corona : Expert coroner and Neroin’s sidekick. Neroin is the brain and she is… absolutely everything else. Neroin is good at knowing, not much at doing. Cassandra always keeps her bubbly perosnnality even when working on horrific crime scenes. Sometimes too much…
🍵 Inspector Capreux : Great Europol Inspector. Efficiency is his middle name. He usually solves most his cases in a couple hours but the 12 Strokes aren’t usual cases... Despite being french, he acts like the most cliche english person ever.
⚔️Lexia Durah : If Justice is blind, she is her guide dog. Me Durah is the world’s greatest defense attorney. She only takes on the worst hopeless causes and never loses. A living get-out-of-jail-free card, for the worst criminals. But they pay the price as she makes sure her fees end up ruining them once they’re free. After which she donates the money to charity. In the past, she already made several murderers that were caught by Neroin walk free.
🕰️Jacques Mart : The mysterious entity who contacted Neroin. He knows 12 murders will happen. He knows the exact when, where, how and who. How is this possible ?
I actually created Neroin Stix years ago but only wrote 2 short stories of 2 pages each. On paper though, and I never digitalised them.
It’s reading one of the Mary Higgins Clark novel (don’t remember the title) that inspired me to write Neroin Stix. In MHC’s story, the suspect is schizophrenic, and I thought of making a schizophrenic detective. But years later, when I rebooted Neroin Stix, I completely changed the character from the ground up. The detective with a psycho quirk is of very bad taste and sadly all too cliche.
<aside> 🚧 yet to be digitalised
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This first novella from Neroin Stix : the 12 Strokes actually originated from a writing competition on the french Quizzbiz forums. The theme was Christmas. I only wrote the first chapter and 5 years later, I decided to finish it (it’s more a reboot, since I had no more idea of what was supposed to happen in the original).
I wanted to try out ChatGPT, so I asked it to roleplay a murder mystery to see what it would come up with. Result : meh, the only good parts I liked were when I forced it into one direction. If you can write, I would definitly not advise anyone to use ChatGPT as writing help. Let’s say the time you spend on it trying to make it do something good is greater than the time you’d spend brainstorming yourself.
Still, you can read the slightly modified story here : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XmFTz5vc-ZldlV_lGv-UIkrTL7ZdrR5cfWPBkl0C4ZU/edit?usp=sharing
Novella 2 Cover Concept
Neroin Stix
Inspector Capreux
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