Figuring out if she was drugged and date-raped at a party, solving the heinous murder of her best friend and getting locked in a refrigerator that someone lit on fire – that’s just another day in the life of high school sleuth Veronica Mars.

The UPN drama “Veronica Mars,” currently in its second season, follows sharp-witted 18-year-old Veronica (Kristen Bell), who’s not your typical high school senior. While attending Neptune High School in the fictitious and snobby coastal community of Neptune, just outside San Diego, Veronica mines through various mysteries and complexities while trying to survive adolescence in one piece.

Smart, sarcastic, sassy and strong, Veronica will stop at nothing to solve some of the most bizarre and convoluted crimes that ever hit Neptune. It’s not uncommon to see Veronica snooping around in dark streets and alleyways armed with a telescopic-lens camera and other high-tech spying devices. Her character is forced to be quite the little actress, frequently going undercover as part of her unpredictable line of work.

Veronica had to grow up after her estranged alcoholic mother left town with no explanation. Now living with her private-eye father, Keith Mars (Enrico Colantoni), Veronica morphs into a no-nonsense crime solver while working for her father at his business, Mars Investigations. Her reputation as a diligent detective gets around at school, with classmates calling on Veronica to get to the bottom of their dilemmas. She even gets paid a little extra cash for the effort.

The Gay & Lesbian Times recently spoke with creator and executive producer Rob Thomas about “Veronica Mars,” which returns from its hiatus on March 15 with a gay-themed episode.

In the episode, Neptune High’s handful of closeted teens turn to Veronica for help when a blackmailer obtains a list of names, cracks into a private online bulletin for the students and threatens to publicly out everyone associated with the site unless they pay $5,000 apiece. Kristin Cavallari from MTV’s “Laguna Beach” stars in the episode as Veronica’s closeted classmate Kylie, who’s also a cheerleader at the school.

The idea of the episode initially revolved around a string of pizza boy muggings that took place in Neptune, Thomas said.

“Well, that gives us one good active story, but what can the twist be, more than they were getting their money pouch stolen?” he said. “So we started to think, what if they stole their wallet, what can we have in it?”

So the creators made the contents include a list of the names of Neptune High’s gay teens and their online handles.

Thomas said the actual title of the episode, “Versatile Toppings,” resulted from a misunderstanding between him and producer Dan Etheridge, who described to Thomas what it meant to be a “negotiable top” in gay lingo.

“And I completely misunderstood him, and started using ‘versatile top’ instead of ‘negotiable top,’” Thomas said.

So far, each season of “Veronica Mars” has had both an overarching and an underlying mystery. In the first season, it was who killed Veronica’s best friend, Lilly Kane. This season involves a tragic bus crash that kills seven Neptune High students. Veronica was supposed to be on that bus, and is convinced the crash was deliberate – someone was trying to kill her.

Each week, clues as to what really happened are revealed one by one, leaving viewers anxiously waiting for more. In one episode, a dead man washes ashore and has Veronica’s name written on his hand. Veronica had seen that same man the day before at a candlelight vigil held for the students that died in the bus crash. Coincidence? Veronica doesn’t think so.

Although the critically acclaimed show doesn’t garner mega-ratings, it developed a devout, almost cult-like following during its first season, which has resulted in a handful of “Veronica Mars” fan sites. Web sites like televisionwithoutpity.com (which features “Veronica Mars” recaps along with recaps of 20 other television shows) and marsinvestigations.net have blossomed into their own online communities, complete with blow-by-blow episode recaps, in-depth analyses of clues, interviews, message boards and general observations. Other fans have created online blogs devoted to reviewing each season in critical detail, establishing yet another sounding board for dedicated fans.

Executives at “Veronica Mars” treat these fans seriously, and consider them an important asset to the show’s future. On Feb. 27, a Veronica Mars Bloggers Press day took place at Stu Segall Productions in Kearny Mesa in appreciation of the show’s online fan base. The event also created a lot of buzz for the last portion of the season.

Most of the show’s interior scenes are shot at Stu Segall, while outdoor scenes are filmed throughout San Diego County. Viewers may recognize the Hotel Del Coronado, Ocean Beach’s Newport Avenue or Mission Beach’s Belmont Park.

“It became, in a way, like a free focus group with each episode,” Thomas said about the show’s fan sites. “… I was always curious what things the fans think work and which things they don’t think work.”

Thomas admitted that the creators and fans of these particular Web sites do not exactly represent the typical “Veronica Mars” viewer. “They’re sort of the super-fans,” Thomas said. “… They typically are very into the season-long mystery and all this stuff about the characters’ lives, and sort of the mystery of the week is the least of their interests. Whereas I think the casual fan, because they don’t watch it every episode, the case that’s introduced to be solved each week is a little more important.”

As far as a central mystery for the third season, Thomas said his writing team has already thought of one and plans to hint at it during the final episodes of this season. “I think the savvy viewer will see it and think, ‘Ah ha, I’ll bet you we’ll come back to that,’” he said.

UPN announced in January that it plans to merge with The WB and form the CW network in September. Shows like The WB’s “Gilmore Girls” have already been confirmed for next season. “Veronica Mars,” on the other hand, has not yet been confirmed for a third season, but Thomas is confident it will make the cut. Critics have already been speculating about pairing “Gilmore Girls” with “Veronica Mars” on the same night, since the shows have similar target audiences.

Thomas believes the pairing could lead to higher ratings. “If we’re on the CW schedule, then it’s great news for us. I think we’ll have a lead-in that makes more sense,” he said.

“… And, not to mention, not having ‘One Tree Hill’ on at the same time as us also feels like it will help us.”

Thomas said he first conceived of the idea for “Veronica Mars” when writing a teen crime novel that he owed Simon & Shuster about seven years ago. The storyline had many “Veronica Mars” elements already in place. The only difference was that the central character in his book was a boy teen detective instead of a girl. But he noticed that many teen-only dramas focusing strictly on romantic and personal issues were becoming less common on television – he needed something else to add to the mix.

“They weren’t making a lot of them, and my favorite, ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ had just been cancelled,” he said. “I really felt like that was the death of small-story television. At the time, I was feeling sort of like a ‘Northern Exposure’ writer in a ‘CSI’ world, where there weren’t many character-driven shows in the air. That it was becoming increasingly dominated by high-incident franchise shows – cops, lawyers, doctors.”

Thomas went back to his detective idea because it coupled a crime-stopper mystery angle with a teen sensibility. Once he had his hook, he wrote a spec script before pitching the idea to the networks. The rest is history.

“The original pilot script was a degree darker,” he said, “but I was still surprised that on network television I was able to have a protagonist who had been through a date rape and wasn’t particularly huggable.”

“Veronica Mars” airs on Wednesdays at 9:00 p.m. on UPN.