Explanatory note: Over on LJ, a friend of mine posted a poll asking this question and giving semi-obscure descriptions of fictional detectives (amateur and otherwise). The only problem was that he (and his respondents) often didn’t give the answers to who these people are. Of course, some of the descriptions can fit more than one fictional sleuth, but that’s part of the fun.
Still, it struck me that people here would have a lot of fun coming up with descriptions like this, so I thought I’d ask y’all to roll your own. [ETA: He gave me permission to use his idea. Descriptions below are all my own.]
I’m putting this in Cafe Society since we’re talking about fictional sleuths and it felt like a short version of threads like If LotR Had Been Written By Someone Else.
Mods can feel free to move to the Game Room if they feel that’s more appropriate.
To start:
Murders and other mysteries should be solved by:
[ol]
[li]A waiter at an exclusive men’s only dining club Henry Jackson, The Black Widowers[/li][li]A venerable sage with a slight flaw in his character and his innocent derrick of a partner Master Li and Number Ten Ox, Bridge of Birds[/li][li]A librarian turned romance writer Jacqueline Kirby, *The Seventh Sinner *[/li][li]A Valkyrie-like historian and her art thief lover Vicky Bliss, Borrower of the Night[/li][li]An Egyptian archaeologist with a strong parasol and a belt of tools Amelia Peabody, Crocodile on the Sandbank (Yes, I rather like Elizabeth Peters.) [/li][li]A sociopathic police detective with the face of an angel Kathy Mallory, Mallory’s Oracle[/li][li]A studious Rabbi David Small, Friday the Rabbi Slept Late[/li][li]A trio of adolescent boy who report to a famous director of suspense films Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators[/li][li]A puzzling Scottish alcoholic detective John Rebus, Knots and Crosses[/li][/ol]
I would have given the spoilered answers in a later post. I knew four of the above, but the temptation was too great to check if the other guesses were correct. They weren’t. I like the idea, though.
One last boost, before this tumbles off into obscurity.
An ex-Marine with a penchant for redheads and a moribund partnerGarrett and the Dead Man, Sweet Silver Blues
A Confucian judge during the T’ang Dynasty Judge Dee, Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee
The Other Waldo Pepper, I haven’t read any of the Tommy & Tuppence mysteries. I think I’ll have to look into them. I didn’t know they “adopt[ed] the personas and techniques of literary detectives”. Sounds a bit meta.
They do it in PARTNERS IN CRIME, a collection of short stories where they get asked to run a sting operation by setting up shop in a detective agency being used as a front company for foreign spies; their employer doesn’t actually care whether they solve crimes for the bona fide clients who show up thinking it’s a legitimate business, but Tommy and Tuppence oblige anyway. And while it’s pretty danged meta while they’re trying out gimmicks from assorted fictional sleuths – often while pointing out why their first attempts keep failing, because the approach in question doesn’t actually work in real life – it goes over the top in the finale, when Agatha Christie has 'em go all Poirot to solve a locked-room mystery.
Probably. I’m also not sure of the density of pure mystery fans vs. SF fans here, so that may thin things out a bit–I certainly haven’t known the answers to most of these.
In light of the latter, here are two more that span both genres:
A former reporter and would-be pulp author who has taken to the nightlife of post-Depression Chicago.
A private detective who has put dancing and death behind her, though with less success at the latter than she’d like.
