The ring of the doorbell, the pop of a champagne cork, a peal of laughter from another room. Wicked gossip, a meaningful glance across the dining table, a knife secreted in a napkin. The host must step away for just a moment to take an urgent phone call, would you all keep yourselves occupied? No, nothing is the matter. Unless something is?
Thrillers and mysteries are genres of danger, suspense, violence, murder. Not anything you’d want at an elegant soirée or holiday bash or a cozy dinner with close friends. But a startling number of thrillers and mysteries have at least one party in their pages or onscreen. All those cozy mysteries set at house parties at some grand estate; the Christmas party in The Thin Man (the movie adds a dinner party too); the pity party and the high school kegger in Sharp Objects; Rope, which takes place in its entirety at one cocktail party. Why so many parties, in these genres of secrecy and threat?
Not a question I had ever asked myself, despite writing three spy novels and a contemporary thriller that all feature multiple scenes of merrymaking fraught with skullduggery. Why do the features of a party complement the features of suspense so well? Why did I feel so compelled to invite my spies to dinner parties and send my serial killer to brunch?
Any group of people with differing motives and different amounts of information all interacting with each other is going to introduce dynamism and unpredictability, but there are other ways to get them all in a room besides sending out invitations. And while parties provide an opportunity for the juxtaposition of grim subject matter (murder! international espionage! organized crime!) with gaiety and fun, I think a party is good for more than putting a variety of people in the same place, or juxtaposing champagne flutes with poison.
There are a few categories of party that tend to crop up in thrillers and mysteries. Country house parties or similar are good for isolating a group of people from the rest of the world, but giving them freedom to maneuver within the bounds of the stately home, the steam yacht, the house upstate. That freedom provides an opportunity for groups and individuals to operate in secret from the other guests. Colonel Mustard in the Kitchen with the Lead Pipe, if you will. But with such a limited cast, the possibilities are limited too, especially if the number of guests starts dropping. Eventually, the truth will come out.
Think of every mystery set at somebody’s family estate or hunting lodge. Peter Wimsey puzzling out the details of a tragic murder at a shooting party in Clouds of Witness. I’ll even include Murder on the Orient Express here, despite the fact it happens on a train. Everyone trying to remember who was where at what time, wondering whose footsteps they heard on the stairs, who had the key to which cupboards, which boots belong to which footman. Who is sleeping in which bedroom? And were they really sleeping there at all? Too many people all in one place, going about their own intrigues, and too many secrets under one roof.
My second novel, Armistice, is a political thriller set almost entirely at a high-stakes house party with a rotating cast; everyone is in and out of a producer’s opulent villa over the course of the book; different groups of people keep meeting up there with different results. And in the follow up, Amnesty, the few people left standing after the fallout meet up for a not-so-jolly holiday weekend in the country; eavesdropping, voyeurism, and accusations of past crimes abound, but everybody stays through the new year because it’s the polite thing to do, despite an excruciating formal dinner from which I, its author, would almost certainly have fled.
Dinner parties serve some of the same isolating function as house parties, but with less opportunity to sneak away alone or break off with a group. A dinner party is a wonderful place to weasel out secrets nobody wants to share. In the thrust, parry, and riposte of polite conversation, to refuse an answer or fall silent when directly addressed is a faux pas that draws attention. Set someone at a plate between several pairs of silverware and they are trapped for interrogation. To leave the table would be unthinkable, perhaps even an admission of guilt.
In John Le Carré’s final novel, Silverview, there is a marvelous (read: painful) dinner party where we meet the mysterious Deborah, retired and dying spy, who “speaks what she thinks and…thinks a lot, so anything could happen.”
The scene begins with a palpable air of tension, of alliances and enmities—who sits and sips their wine versus who sets the table; who is toasted with champagne and who is not. Polite conversation is made about theoretical trips to London—just not that trip to London, the fateful trip Deborah must never know about. Unless she already does. Does she?
Our hero Julian is trapped at the table, trying to keep up with two or three conversations occurring at once, trying to maintain peace. The beleaguered daughter Lily tries to calm down and distract her mother, terrified husband Edward is no help at all. Deborah is all challenge, wrong-footing her guests at every turn, with a host of motives they may or may not understand. And nobody willing to challenge her, because after all, it’s just a little dinner party and we should humor the dying wife. Nothing’s really at stake.
The following scene begins “somehow it’s coffee time,” which is about how you feel once you’ve gotten through it. The sheer effort Julian expends to keep this sinking ship afloat—and to keep his secrets—makes the scene exhausting to read. We’re left with the impression Deborah is absolutely formidable; if she’s this scary at a dinner table she must have been hell in the service.
Cocktail parties and their ilk—birthday, kegger, Christmas fête—are generally a little more crowded and frenetic than house or dinner parties, and give a sense of chaotic claustrophobia. Imagine the villain or hero hemmed in on all sides by witnesses or hostile actors; the obliviousness of the other guests to sinister dealings in their midst; the disorientation of keeping up several conversations of varying import simultaneously. It’s so overwhelming that anyone on edge is apt to lose their grip, let something slip, say the wrong thing.
The cocktail party in The Thin Man, made famous by the film adaptation and Myrna Loy’s incredible candy-striped chiffon, is on the page a head-spinning machine gun barrage of dialogue from different characters entering and exiting the scene. Nick Charles and Dorothy Wynant are trying to have a conversation about her family, and her suspicions about them. But people keep butting in, asking Nick to play ping-pong, flirting with Dorothy, playing music on the radio. Dorothy starts to cry. The telephone is ringing, and Nick’s glass is empty.
It feels like there are about ten things happening at once, most of them urgent. And in the middle of all of this, a call from a man who might have some information, might need Nick to do a job. But Nick is trying to host a party and keep this girl from getting hysterical in the middle of it. The guy hangs up on him—or something more sinister—and then the dog is jumping up, and the ping-pong game has finally gotten started. More people have come in from somewhere, all strangers. Everyone is drunk and obstreperous.
It’s sheer chaos to read: you could lose an important detail easily in there. As the narrator, Nick doesn’t have time to serve up a clue on a silver platter. It’d be a miracle if he noticed it himself.
Big parties—a gala, a fundraiser, a ball—create even more hubbub and distraction. Lots of bodies moving in the background, the roar of hundreds of voices making eavesdropping impossible. Stray elbows and stepped-on feet. Niches to hide in. Anonymous caterers in matching uniforms who are certainly not up to anything suspicious. The crush of the crowd on the dance floor.
Ellen Kushner’s The Privilege of the Sword is emphatically a political thriller even if it’s shelved in the fantasy section. In Sword, several of our key players end up at the Rogues’ Ball, the biggest party in town for the wrong kind of people. Some of them are prepared for the ribaldry, the overload of sensation. Some of them are not. Conniving cutthroats take advantage of dizzy naïfs in the shadows; secret deals are sealed and vendettas are born; and all of it hidden by masks, under a rain of confetti and an orchestra of laughter, with none of the other guests the wiser.
Galas are the kind of party I like to make use of them the most. Amberlough has multiple theatrical intermissions thick with crowds, cigarette smoke, and intrigue. Armistice opens with a politically fraught movie premier. Amnesty features an electoral battleground dressed up as a memorial gala for fallen soldiers. Base Notes, my thriller about murderous millennials on the make, has a SoHo launch party for a fetish fashion collaboration. The kind of party where you might not really want to run into anyone you know, let alone your employer. Let even further alone the employer who’s blackmailing you, who you’re planning to betray, to whom you must now introduce your friends. Cue forced small talk and a frantic search for a graceful exit.
Parties in genres of suspense often generate a feeling of paranoia, of entrapment. They are snares waiting to spring. They are a snake pit, a tunnel full of trip switches. Why?
Because parties are about the social contract. They are ostensibly about having fun and cutting loose, but they actually have a strict unspoken code of etiquette. And any guest who doesn’t abide by that code is marked suspicious, potentially punished. There are certain questions you cannot ask, certain things you cannot point out, just as there are certain questions you cannot avoid answering. You can’t make a scene at a party. If you do, you might be asked to leave, or you might just be ignored. Are you being strangled by the serial killer behind the champagne fountain? Good luck—nobody wants to get involved with that.
The social contract is also what reins in most party confrontations to a furious simmer, so that a backhanded compliment or snide remark burns three times as hot; if not for the constraints of etiquette, it might have been a full-on fight. Instead, all of that hostility is packed into one searing aside.
The constraints of the party work perfectly to force information from characters, or at least keep them on their toes as they attempt to avoid divulging it. These constraints thrust antagonists into close proximity but prevent them from doing real harm—unless they do it creatively. They disorient the driven, befuddle the focused, pin down the evasive. Parties work so well in these genres because their code of unspoken etiquette is completely at odds with the tropes of suspense. In a genre so concerned with actions that break the social contract—secrets, violence, extortion, murder—a scene that subtly enforces it compels truths to surface that might otherwise have remained hidden in the murky underworld.
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Featured image: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,
‘Ball at the Moulin Rouge’, 1889-90, oil on canvas
