Rahan does indeed also know that one can make music using a reed. (In fact, he invented the flute.) Rahan knows many, many things. Rahan always wants to know more things. Thus when Rahan encounters a suspiciously large tribe ruled by an omnipotent supreme leader, Rahan investigates said lethally godlike powers.
Come, ivory knife, the prehistoric game is afoot!
Now, you know Le Chef Des Chefs is a totes awesomesauce story because it's got an arena fight against three different kinds of panthers... and that's not even the climax! The A-plot revolves around Big Chief Cue-Ball's supernatural ability to call death on his victims from afar through no visible means (spears, arrows, rocks-fall-everybody-dies, etc.) from the safety of his shadowed hut. Rahan, upon performing a quick post-mortem of one of the victims, discovers a tiny plant spine embedded in his skin. When he finally works his way up to the boss battle above, he puts two and *this-many-fingers* together at the sight of the chief's blowgun, a very surreptitious means of killing unfamiliar to his tribe. That thar be sum fine dee-ducin' yo.
Every time I go back to re-read some issue of Rahan, I rediscover amusing details. Lecureux Sr.'s imagination in creating tension and mystery for stone-age plots is admirable, but as I've grown older I've especially gained an appreciation for Andre Cheret's artistic skill. Tiny details like the chief's eeee-veel pointed fingernails and wriggly quavering untrustworthy speech bubbles didn't register consciously to me at eight years old. Neither did the fact that they totally cheaped out on coloring Rahan's skin in that first panel (check it against the background sky gradient) and yet it still works in as far as he's supposed to be back-lit and shadowed. Then there's the red-shifted third panel, the moment of revelation, the split-second when the dramatic tension breaks, aided by the chief's speech bubble suddenly reverting to serious, standard form (when the villain cuts his monologue short, look out!) and by the speed lines suggesting he's lifting the reed up suspiciously quickly. Without belaboring every such detail, handing us the sensory data by which Rahan suddenly solves the case went a long way toward putting young readers in the hero's shoes.
Caveman detective fiction. Not the most predictable genre mash-up. Not very frequent in Rahan either. Most issues of the comic tended toward co-op PvE rather than PvP encounters. Yet once in a while Rahan had to unveil some evil oppressive autocrat's means of deceiving his tribe into obedience or sleuth his way through a good old-fashioned stone-age murder mystery. Mystery is itself gradually becoming a historical genre. Modern crime solving is highly technical and not very dramatic, thus audience-unfriendly on two fronts. So, many authors stick to Agatha Christie's 1950s or interwar settings, before the panopticon had turned all of London into a voyeur's paradise. Victorian England (or the Victorian anglophone world) is of course another favorite as the setting for our prototypical fiction of sleuthery, Sherlock Holmes.
So I got to wondering how many historical detective fictions I'd personally encountered. After all, murder most foul adds spice to any setting, and even though neither murder mysteries nor period pieces are my "thing" it's amazing what you run into in the course of perusing good art.
Stone age: Rahan
Medieval: Cadfael
Renaissance: The Name of the Rose (technically set pre-Renaissance, but its tone definitely matches)
Victorian / Edwardian: more than I care to recall.
Now, it strikes me that I'm missing vast swathes of history in between there. Why have I never read/watched/comicked a modern detective story set in Ancient Rome, for instance? Wikipedia lists quite a few and I'm certainly not averse to reading about Vestals gladiusing Praetorians or what-not. Are all those books just crap, beneath notice? Same goes for Ancient Egypt. It's a theocracy in a half-desert, half-swamp environment. You'd think the intrigue and scene-setting would write themselves. Plus, everybody's got kohl-blackened villainous eyes! Or what about the Enlightenment Age? Leyden jars, astronomical ellipses, private collections of exotic fauna, all that pre-steam steampunk has got to make for a captivating backdrop. Where's all my musket-murder mysteries at?
Being mainly a science fiction fan, I have to note the relative scarcity of futuristic mysteries as well. Isaac Asimov took a stab at it with some of his Robot stories. Aside from that, the mystery of future technology and the mystery of Mystery might seem redundant. Unveiling two things at once is overkill and overwork. Why blow two wads on one manuscript when you can split the concept up and sell two books? Amirite, writers? Plus, it's hard enough getting the technical know-how to dream up hard science gimmicks without also failing to imagine realistic uses for them. The mystery genre can't even keep up with the possibilities of cellphones, much less Johnny Mnemonic implants and hyperspace quantanets.
Paradoxically, setting anything during the better studied historical periods runs into the same caveat. Three pages into your civis romanus murder mystery you'll have three dozen geeks writing you angry e-mails for having totally mis-represented the piss-boiling process for wool-padded Legionnaire leather armor. Write Carolus Linnaeus into your story and you'll get half the botanists in the world sending you angry lilies. Don't even dare touch Babylonian prostitutes. (No, really. You don't know where they've been. (Babylon, maybe?))
It does seem like pre-historic whodunits hit upon a winning formula: each can hinge on simple social systems and some modus operandi utterly mundane by today's standards (like blowguns) but unknown to Caveman Grog. Other than that, maybe one can take refuge in obscurity. Given that murder most foul can freshen anything, make your setting anything. Set it in 1200s Teutonic Estonia or Post-Roman Moravia or some lowland backwater of the Incan Empire in the 1400s. You'll have much fewer expert sources to read. All five people who give a shit about the topic will probably just be too glad to see it get some attention to really quibble over details. As for everyone else, let them come for the poisoned darts and stay for the quaint trivia.
Just provide us with some speed lines and speech bubble shifts to help us keep up in unfamiliar terrain.
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