Murder Mystery Dinner

 

By Thomas Kies

Fair warning that this blog will be short.  One of the reasons is that it’s summertime here on the North Carolina coast and it’s too damned nice to be sitting for long in my office behind the screen of my laptop.

The other reason is that when I am in my office (which I do more often than I should) I’m working on a couple of projects including a new one for me.  I’m working on the script for a murder mystery dinner to take place early in September and hosted by our local college's culinary school. 

The characters for the mystery are all recurring from my Geneva Chase mysteries.  Seeing them come to life should be interesting.  We’re going to be holding auditions tonight and the director told me that the interest level is high.

She then went on to tell me that now the word has gotten out, people are asking how they can buy a table. 

When I write a book, there’s a certain amount of internal pressure involved.  I want to write something engaging and tell an interesting story. I want to write something that people want to read and once they have, they’ll say that it was worthwhile.

While writing this script, I’m feeling a familiar pressure, but in a different way.  When someone reads my books, I can’t see them.  Any reaction I get comes later.

There’s an old saying that goes when you write a book it’s like telling a joke and waiting a year or two to see if anyone laughs.

The murder mystery dinner is a different animal.  I’ll see right then and there the audience reaction.

That’s terrifying.

What if they hate it?  Or worse yet, what if they’re bored?

The working title for my mystery dinner is Death of an Author.  I hope that’s not prescient.

I’ve written a script mostly for laughs.  But now that I’ve sent it to the director, I’m thinking that perhaps I should have included more pathos.  But when you’re at a table with friends eating chicken cordon bleu, do you want a lot of soul searching?

This whole thing is a fundraiser for the Carteret Community Theater.  Their building was nearly destroyed during Hurricane Florence and they’re raising money to put it all back together again.  As I said, tonight the theater is doing auditions where they’ll be reading lines from the script.

This whole thing is making me almost as nervous as when I’m waiting for the national reviews for an upcoming book.  Point of information, this dinner was to be the launch of my newest book, WHISPER ROOM.  But the release date is August 2^nd and the dinner is scheduled for a month later.

So, I may be doing a launch/book signing before the theater puts on its show.  But, hey, we can sell dinner tickets while I’m selling books. Can't we?  This show business thing is all new to me.