I am not (as regular readers are probably aware) a fan of e-books. In fact, I rarely buy them. I’d rather read a print version of a novel. There’s a sense, with e-books, that they’re missing something. There’s an inherent opportunity for experimentation in style that is never fully exploited. I mean, if I have to strain my eyes to read something there’d better be a damn good reason.

The Daughters of Freya is an attempt to remedy the problem of the e-book, to create a storytelling experience dependant on technology. Told as a sequence of emails (sent to the reader’s inbox) the story takes place in “real time” and also includes links to exterior content that flesh out the world you’re reading about. There are photos, articles, websites, travel tickets, all kinds of stuff. It’s a bold attempt to tell a story in a strikingly different manner to most standard e-books and it is a credit to its creative team (dare I call them authors? I don’t know, exactly) that it actually manages to work.

The Daughters of Freya follows journalist Samantha Dempsey into the seedy world of a California cult that encourages its members to indulge in sexual relations. The titular cult are – naturally – seedy and possibly dangerous. Although Sam publishes a fairly innocuous article about the cult, she feels further investigation is required when she is contacted by those who claim that there is far more to the cult and its founder than meets the eye.

The mystery is delivered to the reader’s inbox at the rate of several emails a day. The idea is that the mystery is told in “real time”, making Daughters of Freya akin to a web-based “24” style thriller. The conceit is one that could be badly misused, but the creative talent behind Daughters have enough wisdom to make it work well; you almost forget that these events are fictionalised, that you do not know these people. In fact the only thing that destroys the illusion is the inclusion of several emails in a single message. Not only that if you happen to miss out on a few emails because you have more important things to work on then you can build up a huge backlog on which you need to catch up. This can seem daunting when you consider there are 97 mailings that are delivered during the course of the mystery. It can be easy for someone to lag behind and feel like it will be a chore to catch up.

That said, reading Daughters is hardly a chore. The writing flows nicely, with each character separated in their attitudes and writing style. Some characters make characteristic typos (which this reviewer trusts is not down the creative team’s own flaws!) and others are more inclined to chat about their personal lives. In fact, the personal subplots of Daughters add to the deception of reality and are nicely flavoured even if occasionally you wonder why no one telephones anyone else about these important matters!

One major worry I had before commencing to read The Daughters of Freya is how the creative team could sustain tension throughout. Emails, by their nature are written retrospectively, after the fact. You know that when someone’s writing a mail they are still alive. This could easily have taken away much of the tension of the story, left us with a somewhat bland mystery. As has been noted, of course, these guys are nothing if not creative and while I feel there is some fudging towards the end of the tale, it works very well at ratcheting up the tension. There is a sense of genuine surprise at some of the final twists and turns, which caught even this reviewer on the hop. The form does lend itself to clever sleight of hand and misdirection which the creative team exploit well towards the climax of the tale. I do have to wonder, though, if Daughters had been written in a traditional manner, whether I would have been so excited. There is a feeling that plot-wise, we have been here before. It is carried off with such aplomb, however, that this doesn’t matter.

Another intriguing aspect of Daughters is the use of external content to add to the mystery. The journalistic articles by Sam Dempsey are well written and presented and often other media such as photos and websites both real and created especially for the mystery are employed to add a sense of reality. I do wonder, however, how much some of the external content adds to the mystery. The inclusion of e-tickets and the occasional repetition of links to photographs of certain characters becomes irritating as the reader wonders how much this adds to the experience; is it nothing more than a gimmick? Luckily, however, such lapses in gimmick-judgement are few and far between and the reader can easily skip exterior content they know to be gimmicky (I found myself avoiding links to e-tickets, for example, but checking out every magazine article and journalistic link).

The Daughters of Freya is an entertaining new-media mystery, an experiment in style that is bold enough to work on its own terms. It takes the e-mystery into a new domain, into possibilities that were always present but never properly explored. It is a bold experiment that works well, blending form and content into an entertaining journey for the reader. Is it an experiment that can be repeated? Well, only time can tell us that. I am not sure whether this could be repeated successfully, but it would be interesting to see someone give it a try. In the meanwhile, however Daughters stands on its own as unique and largely successful new-media mystery.

The Daughters of Freya - a 'real-time email mystery' delivered straight
to the reader's inbox!

It began, appropriately enough, with an email. In January, 2003, David
Diamond, a long-time friend and fellow writer, emailed me with a
proposition. "Let's write a book together. Composed entirely of emails."
Epistolary novels had been around for a couple of centuries. Why not
update the concept for the modern age?

The 'e-pistolary' format was tailor-made for a mystery. It would allow
us to take advantage of one of the more insidious aspects of the
internet -- you never know who's on the other end of an email.

David had written an article on a cult for Wired magazine and thought
the topic would make for a great setting for a mystery. He's a
journalist, a perfect vocation for a sleuth, so we decided our
protagonist should be one too. It took a few more emails, and some
feverish activity from our collective unconscious, to come up with the
idea of a cult that believed sex was the solution to the world's
problems. A google search unearthed Freya, the Norse goddess of
sexuality, giving us the name of the cult, and of the mystery -- The
Daughters of Freya.

Within a couple of weeks we'd written the first few emails. A friend
sends journalist Samantha Dempsey a desperate message. "Help. My
daughter has dropped out of school and joined a sex cult in California."
(Where else would it be?) Samantha pitches the story to an old college
friend who edits a magazine in San Francisco, and is soon headed to
Marin County where she finds out there is more to the cult than meets
the eye.

David lives in Marin County and I live in Toronto and over the next
several months we hammered out many of the details. Some were dictated
by the format we had chosen. If our characters were going to be
corresponding by email, they would have to be in different locations.
Hence a journalist based in Toronto, a husband who spends most of his
time on business in Russia, a neurotic mother in Pennsylvania, a
golf-loving-diehard Republican father in Arizona, and a son away at
college and in love with an older woman. By the summer of 2003 we had a
basic plot.

Then we decided to add a new wrinkle -- send the book out by email. The
idea emerged while I was on a cycling trip in British Columbia with a
friend. Killing time in a bar one night, I told him about our new
project. He stopped me in mid-sentence: "Don't publish the emails in a
book. Send them out by email, a few emails every day."

It would have the same built-in element of suspense that Dickens
exploited with his serialized novel -- the ability to end an installment
on a cliffhanger -- but it had an added twist. By sending the emails out
in daily installments, the reader would experience the mystery in 'real
time'. As the investigation proceeded, he or she would get to go along
for the ride.

It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time but it was late at night and
my friend and I were staring at a table littered with empty beer
bottles. When it still seemed like a brilliant idea in the morning, I
called David who signed on without a moment's hesitation.

We knew that we were taking a big gamble. After all, nobody had figured
out how to successfully use the internet to deliver fiction. Even
Stephen King had given up on it -- and by last count he had a couple of
million fans to every one of ours. Our project was different. King and
the others were essentially asking readers to open an email and read a
chapter of a book -- and readers were essentially saying 'no thanks'. We
would be asking readers to open an email -- and read an email. As an
added feature the emails would link to websites we would create
specifically for the project, with newspaper and magazine articles
containing clues to the mystery. The theory was that the mystery would
mirror the way people actually used the internet.

For the next few months, we continued our long-distance collaboration.
Then in October 2003 we met in Washington, D.C., locked ourselves in a
room, sat at our laptops across a table from each other, and pounded out
a first draft in four days. We polished the manuscript over the winter
and by the spring of 2004 we were ready to test our theory.

We recruited 40 test readers, men and women ranging in age from 18-80,
with different educational levels and reading habits. The response
surpassed our expectations. In the middle of the mystery readers were
sending unsolicited emails saying they were hooked. At the end, they
reported experiencing withdrawal symptoms. We thought we were either
onto something, or that we knew a lot of very polite people.

We spent the next few months refining and testing the technology that
would deliver the emails to the readers. In mid-September we opened our
website to the public by sending out announcements to friends and
colleagues. This October we officially launched the project at
Bouchercon 2004 in Toronto.

Now we're about to see if our gamble will pay off.

The Daughters of Freya can be purchased at www.emailmystery.com for
$7.49US /$9.99 Cdn. A synopsis, as well as a free preview with the first
3 emails from the mystery is available online.