POLITICS AND POKER

Politics and poker,
Politics and poker,
Make the average guy
A heavy smoker . . .

If politics seems more
Predictable
That’s because
Usually
You can stack
The deck!
- "Politics and Poker"
from the musical "Fiorello"

In these fraught times, when political arguments seem to take up all the air in any given room, how does the mystery author, one writing non-political novels, create believable characters who don’t favor one political party or opinion over another?

One way, of course, is to go ahead and give your characters political opinions. Let ’em duke it out on the page. It can be fun, and exciting – and when the book is published a year or more down the line, hopelessly dated. It’s even worse five, fifteen, twenty-five years from now when someone discovers you as an author and has to struggle through discussions on matters long settled or even forgotten.

In my own regard, with my own books, I ask myself, What Would Agatha Do?

Agatha Christie’s books appeared regularly for six decades. Yet it is rare to find even her earliest books referring to the political situation her characters lived in. Perhaps this is why they remain readable all these years later; they don’t jar by insisting you must know something about the Depression or World War II or the Cold War in order to understand them. Her characters are far too wrapped up in their own problems to comment on the politics of the time.

Go, I say to myself, and do likewise.

I played a solo game of golf last week on my usual par-three, nine-hole course and to my amazement, scored a four on one hole. That’s the best I’ve done to date. I scored a couple of sixes on two other holes and (sadly) much, much higher on the other holes. But a four – that’s a mere bogie, a perfectly respectable score for a beginner!

And then on Monday four of us went on a picnic and played croquet on a professional-size course and I finished dead last. Ah, well.