Playing Clue with Diana Peterfreund

Diana Peterfreund:  Abrams, my publisher, bought a license from Hasbro to use their property in the books.  Then they held auditions. My agent heard about it, and she thought I would be perfect and she asked me if I was a fan of Clue. And then I shot like, five movie quotes for her and she was like, ‘Okay, then you should audition for this.’ The audition was you write a chapter based on the scenario they give you. I did and then I got the job.

There were certain things that they definitely wanted in the brief. Abrams wanted it to be a YA novel. So the characters were going to be teenagers, and they encouraged me to make them very modern, because sometimes when you think of Clue, you think of more old-fashioned things. So they said, go ahead and do whatever you want. But it has to be set at a boarding school. They didn't want the rooms to be classrooms; they wanted the rooms to be used the way that they were originally envisioned, like a library, a lounge, a kitchen.

When I created all the characters, I tried to kind of keep them vaguely familiar to what we think of as the Clue character. Colonel Mustard was a kid from a military academy. Professor Plum was like the resident cool science genius, that kind of thing. I had an open slate to create my own mystery.

People like murder mysteries.  It's kind of interesting to see there's a new generation now that's obsessed with murder mysteries with the podcasts. Now once you write a Clue book, all the Clue fans come out of the woodwork and you hear about everything. So there’s a Clue themed bar night. There's a version of Clue you can play at a house, where they chalk out the squares, and you kind of walk around. It's a way to have a murder mystery dinner party. I think Clue is kind of like the banner theme for people who just like murder mysteries and detective stories.

It's a very good concept. It's a really good game. I think that's why it's lasted for decades. And also it's so malleable. [There are] all these different versions that are Clue themed. My daughter likes watching this little math program called “Odd Squad.” There was an episode where they were solving a story [with] people in the house. It was obviously based on Clue; it was all like General Pentagon and Mrs. Triangle. It was a geometry game. She had never seen Clue before. But then when I was trying to explain to her how Clue works, she was like, “this is like that episode of Odd Squad.”

The boarding school advantage is that they're stuck there. When you're writing a book, it's always about how to keep the characters where you need them to be. So you always have to think, ‘Okay, if there's a murderer in the house with you, a smart person is just gonna walk out, right?’ So you have to have a reason that you can't leave. In the first book, I gave them a snowstorm.

Then in subsequent books, you have to kind of find other reasons. Are the murderers following them out of the house?  What's happening? Why are they in this house still? Why can't they leave the boarding school? What if you're in a situation where your parents aren't letting you leave, or you don't have any other options? A boarding school makes that an easier question to answer rather than a house party at a mansion. Because after the first book, you're like, “I'm not going back to that party. It was a terrible party.”

That's not something that I've done a lot before. I think I'm going to do it a lot more often. Especially with writing mysteries, I felt like I was sort of simultaneously tricking the reader and all also rewarding the reader. I'm tricking the reader because every time I would have them get close to something that might reveal something I could cut away to a different POV. 

But then you're also rewarding the reader because you have the dramatic irony of a character. You're in their POV and you find a clue that that character doesn't know what it is. But the reader does, because the reader has seen it coming. It makes the reader feel good; readers love feeling like they're in the know. Then it also heightens the suspense in the book because the readers like, “Oh my god, they found the letter” or whatever it is and they're like, “Don't go into the basement!”

My books, of course. [laughs] The movie. I actually just encouraged a friend to watch it a couple days ago. And she was like, “this was really, really good.” You just have all of these really genius comic actors at the top of the game and these really clever scripts. I love the movie. I really do. Then as far as the actual games go, definitely Guess Who Clue.