Improv Mystery Creation Event, Provincetown Public Library
Become Agatha Christie for a night! Ever wonder how mystery authors come up with their plots, characters, red herrings? Wonder no more: this is your chance to participate in the making of a mystery! Local mystery author Jeannette de Beauvoir will take audience suggestions for weapons, venues, suspects, and together you’ll weave together a plausible (and often very funny) story! Provincetown Public Library, Provincetown, MA.
“Mystery writer Jeannette de Beauvoir hosted a hilarious Improvisational Mystery Creation event at the Provincetown Public Library in January 2020. Jeannette loves books, loves mysteries, and loves people, and her enthusiasm was contagious. Beginning with character names, Jeannette had the audience supply everything needed for the perfect crime. Audience members all had small notes to write on and put in a hat, and Jeannette would choose someone to draw from the hat a number of possibilities. Five weird and wonderful names went up on the board; then the audience decided who was the victim, the protagonist, the sidekick, the red herring, and the murderer. Jeannette used these categories brilliantly to weave in information about the genre and the craft: the difference between a cozy mystery and a procedural, the importance of sense of place, the formation of character and plot. Things got twistier and twistier as we worked on method (electrocution in the bathtub, perhaps) and motive. Blackmail? Of whom and for what? In less than 90 minutes we had a semi-coherent story to rival Agatha Christie, but I think we had way more fun than Agatha ever did!”