Writing Mystery in a Steampunk World

A Guest Post by Diana Parrilla

I came to steampunk through mystery. Not just the genre, but the idea of mystery itself. And for someone like me, someone who writes stories tangled in secrets and lies, it's the perfect setting. What I love about it is how it walks a line: part historical, part reimagined. You get to rewrite the past, but you still stay tethered to it. There's structure, and most of all, atmosphere. You can't just toss logic out. If anything, you need more of it. The gears have to turn. The world still has to make the same kind of sense as our own. It's a brilliant place to drop a murder. Although, if you ask me, anywhere's a good place for that.

But writing mystery in a steampunk world isn't just about adding brass and fog. It's about shifting how information works. In a contemporary setting, you'd be dealing with phone records, CCTV, and timestamps. In a steampunk world, you can decide those things never existed. No surveillance footage. No GPS trail. People vanish and there's nothing to rewind. Witnesses can lie with far less risk of being caught. And in theory, that makes things easier. For the characters, for the plot, maybe even for the writer. No cameras means secrets stay hidden a little longer, and the lack of evidence is easier to justify for the reader.

As a writer, I never get tired of picking apart my own stories. I try to be as critical as possible, finding logic flaws, questioning motives, making sure every step makes sense in my head. Why didn't he do that? Why would she go there? What's missing? In real life, we do things without much thought. Honestly, we do most things that way. If we didn't, we'd probably be less human. But on the page—especially in mystery—readers look for reasoning. They expect logic behind each decision, even the bad ones. Every action has to carry motive. And so does every moment of hesitation, every failure to act. But the thing is, I don't want it to be easy. Not really. Part of the thrill in writing these stories is making it difficult for myself. I want to back myself into corners. I want to write something that feels like it's unraveling faster than I can hold it together, and then find the thread that ties it all back up.

Every story, for me, is a challenge. Sometimes a quiet one, sometimes a full-blown battle. And not just against the plot. Sometimes it's the characters themselves. They refuse to follow the script. They know something I don't, and they make me work for every clue. That's what makes it satisfying. Writing mystery in this kind of setting means leaning into the strange logic of it. The possibilities expand, not because you've removed rules, but because you've replaced them with new ones.

For anyone who loves mystery and speculative fiction, steampunk is a space where you get to pull both threads at once. You can build the impossible, then ask what would happen if someone used it to commit a crime. Or hide one. Or solve one. And that's why I stay here, in this soot-streaked, gear-cranked corner of fiction. It's not just the aesthetic. It's the tension, the challenge of telling a story that might fall apart if one screw comes loose, but holding it together anyway, just long enough to deliver the truth.

#

You'll be able to read The Copper Train by Diana Parrilla in Steampunk Sleuths, out August the 30th. You can find her online at https://linktr.ee/buffyta17