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If you were an author that wrote something that seemed inherently silly there are a lot of ways to deal with it. One way might be to rewrite it so that it’s not so silly. Another might be to just live with it and learn to accept it knowing that readers will take cues from your confidence. The worst and most common way is to simply hand a lampshade on it and smirk at the audience.
That’s what happens within Real Murders – an Aurora Teagarden Mystery. The author knows she has a silly name and tries to let us know she’s in on the joke. Luckily this doesn’t set the tone for the book or the movie. Both novel and movie focus on a small group of people who meet to discuss murders on a weekly basis. This gets interrupted when one of their members gets killed.
As this was adapted into a made for TV movie, there are a number of amusing budget constrictions. Tim and Vanessa find most of the differences between the two as acceptable if amusing. The book reigns supreme once more though if only because it escapes the hammy acting.
