So I was reading chapter 5 ("The Thriller of Murderous Passions"), and, sure enough, my muse went into action. Intersecting love triangles? How about a full-blown Love Dodecahedron? Did Claude Chabrol make slick thrillers about repressed French bourgeois exploding into murder and then trying to repress all over again what exploded out? Well, I'm American, not French, so my upper-class intersecting love-hate triangles involve the far more predatory corporate-raider class, with much more pyrotechnical results. Of course, a thriller of murderous passions must include the tropes Love Makes You Crazy, Love Makes You Evil, Murder The Hypotenuse, and other jealousy tropes.
So here's the story concept for the script I have in mind, with the working title "Triple Cross". The players:
- George Sasser, tycoon in the defense industry.
- Evelyne Lee Sasser, his highborn Southern-belle wife.
- Gary Pace, hitman.
- Starla Pace, his sexy and amoral gold-digger wife.
- Hugo Wells, Sasser's chief engineer.
- Roy Larkin, Wells' predecessor turned Sasser's bitterest competitor.
- Lina Strange, exotic dancer and the story's Only Sane Person.
The plot goes roughly like this: Evelyne is sleeping with Hugo, and they decide to hire Gary to kill George. Well, turns out George is sleeping with Starla, and they're plotting to kill Gary. Chaos and nasty plot twists ensue. Roy decides to secretly encourage the others to kill each other and manipulate the stock market so he can scoop up Sasser Engineering at a discount. Lina gets caught in the chaos by being the one all the guys and Starla sleep with and ends up being the one who survives to tell the tale.
Right now this is just a concept and needs to be worked out into a full script. The specifics aren't written in stone, so some things could change as the plot (or my muse's whim) requires. But I do think this sounds interesting enough. Maybe I could even find a way to turn it into a movie myself...
