Standard disclaimer applies. Just playing with these people for a while before I send them back to their own 'verse.
Prologue:
Molly Hooper had a rather secret passion: detective mystery stories. One would think this passion to be painfully obvious considering her involvement with the world's only "Consulting Detective", but this was a secret even the illustrious Sherlock Holmes was not aware of. Although, when she was being honest with herself, he was somewhat the inspiration for it, and sometimes the curse of it as well.
His skill at deducing was what drove her to keep this passion as secret as she possibly could. Partly because she didn't want him to realize that she wasn't exactly over him, and partly because she just wanted to keep one part of her life, one part of herself private from his gaze.
She never brought novels with her to work of any sort, let alone these. Her striped tote was usually filled with a favorite medical text, or one she particularly needed at the time, a voice recorder, and two brightly colored notebooks: one green & one red. Out of a convenience of organization the green book contained results from chemical lab experiments while the red contained autopsy observations.
The mystery novels Molly so loved were kept at home, but not on any of her bookshelves. The shelves held medical texts, and more colored notebooks, a couple of classic novels, but nothing even remotely dealing with mysteries. The novels were kept in a trunk in her closet, along with a small stack of purple notebooks. One book was well worn: a translated copy of Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room. The others, however were by a newer author, one "M.H. Lee" and had never been opened.
Molly didn't have to open them to know what was inside. She'd written them.
Chapter 1:
Molly had picked up the habit of color-coordinating her notebooks in med school, finding that it helped her organize her notes more easily. Some of her classmates teased and called her "OCD" but when it came to passing exams, her level of retention made her popular in study groups. She found that not only could she locate previous notes faster with her system, her level of retention had also increased to the point where sometimes she could almost picture exactly which notebook each fact had been stored in and then recall it as needed.
What she didn't excel in during her mid 20s was self-expression. Finding the right words had been somewhat of a chore for her and her earliest papers were downright dismal. She couldn't really afford another class, not with all the tuition she had out on loans already, but on the advice of a friend, she decided to take a "poor man's college" option and simply crashed the class on a daily basis. In any of her other classes this would simply not be allowed, but in "Pop Non-Fiction" the teacher overlooked her presence simply because students who came to his class willingly were somewhat rare. So the sight of one mousy-brown haired girl in the back of the class quietly scribbling in a purple notebook was politely ignored.
It was here that her talent with writing finally blossomed. There was no proof of course; any grades or marks she happened to see on essays handed back to her were completely unofficial and never recorded except in her own sense of self improvement. Yet, ever since that semester, she found her medical thesis papers changed drastically. She learned how to take even a dry term paper and, without ruining the content or information, make it flow, even interject humor a bit of humor at times.
Granted this talent had some exceptions - or at least one exception that she knew of. When it came to writing about a medical topic, or writing about something abstract she was fine. Yet when she had to write about herself, her talent would escape her. She tried, from time to time, to keep a journal, but it just couldn't access the same part of her mind. Invariably it just came out insecure and timid.
Now, after graduation, after completing her doctorate, she found that her pathology job at St. Bart's indeed paid the rent and her bills, but left little else behind. Granted it was better than her uni days, no more "noodle-only" menus in the dorm, but there were times when she wished she could have a more relaxed budget at least.
She got the idea from John's blog somewhat. His talent for talking about himself and his flatmate far exceeded her own ability to self-disclose. Her own attempt to mirror him had been rather humiliating in the long run, especially after she'd made the mistake of mentioning Sherlock by name.
Still, it gave her an idea, perhaps something she could try. What was the worst she'd face? Rejection? She was pretty use to that. Hell she faced it every time she tried talking to Sherlock. Surely no editor could ever cut her as deeply as one of his infamous deductions could.
So after work on day, she slipped into Tescos and purchased several purple notebooks. Normally she wouldn't reuse a color like this, but Molly hoped that it would help rekindle her writing talents and, at least in her mind, it was rather linked to the work she'd done in that one ungraded class. This time, however, instead of filling the first book with a "pop news" nonfiction story, she started to flesh out a murder.
She briefly considered borrowing tidbits from Sherlock's cases but decided that wasn't going to work. First of all, that would pretty much all be covered in John's blog anyway. Second - and perhaps more importantly - even if John's blog didn't exist, Sherlock would surly recognize his own cases. So the first murder she planned out was completely from her imagination.
She worked backwards of course, going from the identity of the culprit to the clues left behind, and what kind of evidence would be created by the event. For the first death she decided on a rather cunning hemlock poisoning case. The symptoms were masked by alcohol abuse in the victim, and thus the police were trying to figure out what had happened.
Molly's only nod to Sherlock was that the man who solved the case was a detective from London, and that he was somewhat acerbic and unattached. Although she really did want to make him tall and lean with dark hair, she drew the line at that and settled on making him shorter, only slightly lean, and rather ginger. He was not yet named, but he was at least a Detective Chief Inspector working in London. Until she'd worked out his name, she simply thought of him as "The London Detective".
It took a half year of work before she had a plausible plot worked out. The purple notebook filled with facts about the poison, about the alcohol abuse, about why the killer targeted the person, and how the detective unraveled the entire mystery. From there on she set about polishing the story, changing a word here or there and, most importantly, addressing the issue of any possible plot holes. The last step was to actually name her detective.
She considered using Sherlock's initials for him at first, but realized it might fool a casual reader, but not the Consulting Detective. Molly might as well put his name in neon lights if she did that. So she tossed a few random names around, consulted a couple of name-generators online and finally settled on Benjamin Night. It seemed simple enough, and she felt it could allude to his attitude of good vs evil, that in his mind things were black & white, like night and day.
After that she worked on her own writing name. Originally she considered using "Mol Lee" as a name but scratched that off rather quickly as being too silly. She tried Molly Cooper, Molly H Cooper, and similar names but still felt it wasn't right. As a bit of a lark she went back to Mol Lee and started again, and suddenly realized she didn't need a first name anyway. It was then that she settled on "M.H. Lee" and figured that would be good enough.
Then the real challenge began: getting the book published.