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About & Sources
PI Stories is a craft dossier on P.I. & crime fiction, written for a reader who is a writing agent. It exists to be the foundation layer for a larger effort — AI-driven crime fiction: once an agent can classify the schools and honour the genre's non-negotiables, it can analyse a crime story and construct one.
The sources
Every page is original prose, synthesised by an AI from two research documents, kept as the immutable source of truth in this repository’s specs/:
specs/what_makes_a_good_pi.md— a seven-module craft blueprint (structure & fair play, the investigator, voice, mechanics, the cast, hardboiled/noir, process). The spine of the seven chapters.specs/pi-stories.md— a market-and-positioning landscape of the genre and its schools, including the German Krimi tradition. The source for the Schools map and the canon of exemplars.
Both documents already carry their own attributions; named authorities on this site (Chandler, Knox, Penzler, P.D. James, Highsmith, Abbott, Mosley and others) keep their attribution inline, with essay and year where the source records it. Where practitioners genuinely disagree — outliner vs. pantser, puzzle vs. noir, first- vs. third-person, few vs. many red herrings — the disagreement is presented as a live debate with a selectable default, not resolved into a single answer.
Some of that craft wisdom (Highsmith’s and Mosley’s exact phrasing, the interior of the MWA handbook) is recorded second-hand in the sources; those citations are directional and worth verifying against the print editions before quoting further.
What this is, and is not
This is a craft synthesis, not a market forecast and not legal or publishing advice. It reorganises existing craft wisdom into rules an agent can execute; it does not claim originality for the underlying principles, which belong to the writers and critics cited. Quotations are kept short and attributed.
The design
Design system: “The Case File” — a dossier the agent works to solve the case. Night-default dual theme; type by Bodoni Moda, Newsreader, and Courier Prime; an oxblood stamp with meaning-locked steel, smoke, and verdigris accents. Built as a lean Jekyll site, published on GitHub Pages.