Murder Mystery Dinner Party

A little departure from all the Christmas day posts floating around on the internet, with a post on a pre-christmas party.

When it came to deciding the theme for our work Christmas Party we ended up going with a Murder Mystery themed dinner at a local pub. I had never done one of these before and boy was it a lot of fun! Dressing up was of course mandatory and the whole thing was set in 1942 Casablanca. Right up my street.

Everyone going took turns drawing character names out of a bag and I was pleased to draw the character Ingrid Pith (I believe a play on the name of the actress Ingrid Pitt) who was a Danish art dealer specialising in works from occupied territories. Apparently my character was meant to be a complete flirt too... oh dear.

I was given advice on what to wear, it consisted of an evening dress, up do and supposedly a lot of cleavage. For the sake of dignity I skipped on the latter somewhat, but I did manage to pin up a blonde wig (it was the one one I got from Fancy Dress for Less that I reviewed here) into a somewhat vintagey style.

The dress is one I got from Monsoon in the sale two years ago (for £23!) that I have not yet wore, I thought it was sort of 30s ish inspired but these days almost everything is vintage inspired... its the only evening dress I have.

The pub had a table set out for each member of the group and we also got little booklets with portions of script and information to use to interrogate the other members of the table and answers to questions they may have. 

As the evening went on we got more and more information along with dinner and the detective (who was played very well by a CD) summed up the details we needed after each round. There was a huge number of nods to Agatha Christie style stories which was a lot of fun as I am a huge fan of Hercule Poirot.

Overall the atmosphere was fun, if a bit chaotic, with most people in the group ending up attempting very stereotypical french accents despite supposedly being from the USA, Germany, Ireland, Russia, Denmark and others... Can you do a Danish accent? Its hard!

It also turned out that my character was a bit of a slut... which was fun to play, and in a fantastic (if I do say so myself) piece of improv I ripped a faux moustache off a gentleman who was not all he seemed! Hehe! It was fun to be so rude!

My hair somehow managed to survive the night pretty well.

I suppose you're wondering if I was the murderer? Well I can't tell you that! But what I can tell you is that I manage to get one of the murders right, and for exactly the right reason, which I was pretty pleased with. All that Poirot training paid of... a bit.