Who's For Dinner?

 

Terry here with the chance to host a dinner part. The catch? You have to invite six characters from crime fiction. 

The reason this question is so interesting is that I had trouble coming up with six. Not that I don’t have characters I find fascinating in crime fiction, but crime novels that are well-written seem so complete. I feel like to pluck characters out of their world and try to have a conversation with them would be taking them into a world (mine) that they aren’t familiar with, and that they wouldn’t shine the way they do in a well-written mystery. 

 Take Elvis Cole, Robert Crais’ LA detective. His repartee is always entertaining. He’s a wise-cracker—in his element, Los Angeles. I live in LA, too, but would he be comfortable at my dinner party? Or does he need the milieu that Crais has created in order to be his entertaining self? Do I need to invite his sidekick, Joe Pike? And would Pike kill one of the other guests for who-knows-what reason? 

 How about somebody like Lady Georgie, Rhys Bowen’s intrepid-ish impoverished royal sleuth?

My guess is she’d eat everything she could get her hands on, so a menu wouldn’t be a problem. But what might be a problem, is that she, like so many amateur sleuths, seems to attract murder. I’d have to be very careful to choose guests who could hold their own (see final dinner party, below). Plus she’s known to be awfully clumsy. I’d have to use the second-best wine glasses. 

 I absolutely adore Tracy Clark’s Harriet Foster, whom I first met in Hide,

but what kind of dinner party guest would she be? Would she be a downer because she’d still be mourning her profound losses? Would she be eyeing all the other guests with suspicion? I think if I invited her new partner, Li, thing might go better. But still, how would it work if I took her out of Chicago and brought her to my beachside house in LA? 

 Jim Ziskin’s Ellie Stone is a great character, a reporter with a keen nose for news, but how would she fare if she had to sit down at my table in southern California? Would she enjoy my ordinary world, or would she be bored? Would she quiz the other guests to tell all their secrets? Would she insist on bringing Fadge?

Timothy Hallinan wrote a fascinating book, Pulped, in which his characters live on after their series has been dropped by a publisher who had all the books pulped.

The attempts of the characters to continue their lives without their creator is poignant, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes perilous. What happens when a character tries to see beyond the limits of what their writer has described? They run into blank spaces. Is that what would happen if they came to a dinner party with people their creators never exposed them to? 

 

The closest I can come to composing a possible dinner party is Mick Herron’s Slough House gang, first introduced in Slow Horses. Oh lord, what would it be like to try to corral those slow horses? (pun intended).

First, I’d have to have the party in Slough House, which solves the problem of taking them out of their milieu. And then I’d serve some kind of English dish, and with a couple of them, a few eccentric dishes. River Cartwright could probably be counted on to eat whatever I served, but what in the world would Roddy Ho eat? My suspicion is that he exists on fast food, the less nutritious the better. And don’t get me started on Jackson Lamb, who’d fart his way through the meal and insult everyone there. But for all of them, it hardly matters what I would cook. The important thing would be to lay in enough alcohol to fell an ox. As for conversation, I’d get to sit back and listen to them bitch about their bitter lot in life: Entertaining, as long as they get to talk the way they do in the books, and for that I’d have to have their creator coaching from the sidelines.