Name Game
Is there really such a thing as an unbelievable character name?
‘So, you ask me the name I’m known by, Cyclops? I will tell you. But you must give me a guest-gift as you’ve promised. Nobody–that’s my name. Nobody–so my mother and father call me, all my friends.’
- Odysseus, Homer’s The Odyssey
Here’s a thing we’re learning: A mystery novel requires a bunch of names. Every time our protagonist needs to speak to someone (or wonder about someone), that someone requires a name. It’s a situation that can stop your progress dead in it’s tracks. There you sit, presumably an author, but feeling more like Homer’s cyclops demanding a name only to hear some little jerk say, “nobody.”
Coming up with names is a unique creative problem. We can’t call every character John or Mary. Not every surname can be Smith. And so you dig around trying to find something that sounds convincing.
But it can’t just be convincing. The best names speak to who a character is. The name of Poe’s detective August Dupin speaks to the hearty and haughty nature of the crime fighter. The name Doyle’s villainous Moriarty speaks to his dark and deathly evil.
This task becomes harder as the characters become increasingly ancillary to the plot. For instance, I recently produced a paragraph about the rumors surrounding a young girls disappearance. It required I name of at least a half-dozen middle school children.
Playground speculation ran rampant: Wendy Wickerson started a rumor that she’d heard Lily’s father had come back from California to take her away and was probably being tracked down right now. Jake Benson said that Lily was probably killed by an ax murderer. His friend, Luke Williams, the son of Chief Wlliams, said he heard his older brother, a senior named Bret, talking to their dad about the Oakland County Child Killings that had happened 30 years ago and that maybe the killer had started up again. Abigail Barns tearfully insisted that Lily had just run away for a little while and was probably just hiding out in some secret place to get attention.
If I’m honest. I’m still not sure about Wendy Wickerson. She seems a bit extra. It’s a big name for a bit part. It’s a distinctly odd name.
If you are an American fan of cozy British crime novels, then you’ve likely enjoyed some of the odd names that can pop up. In Christie’s novels alone you might come across Hester Argyle, Rowena Waddy, Lettice Protheroe, Septimus Bligh and Nevile Strange.
The interesting thing is that, while Americans may find those names odd, they aren’t necessarily that bizarre for the Brits. Consider a story from The Awl documenting names they’ve discovered while watching the credits of British television shows:
Jemima Rooper
Lulu Popplewell
Nigel Bunyan
Felix Pickles
Derek Honeybun
Those are honest-to-goodness real British names. But we are writing an American novel. And while I’d love to have a Felix Pickles it’s just not particularly realistic. Is it?
Actually. Maybe I’m wrong.
I recently caught a news article out of Boston covering the months-long targeted harassment of New Hampshire public radio hosts. The criminal subjects had been identified. Arrests had been made. Their names were now public record. And gosh, what names they were:
According to prosecutors, Tucker Cockerline, 32, of Salem, N.H., Michael Waselchuck, 35, of Seabrook, N.H., and Keenan Saniatan, 36, of Nashua, N.H., conspired to commit stalking through interstate travel. Cockerline and Waselchuck were arrested Friday morning and detained after appearing in federal court in Boston. Their next hearing is scheduled for June 20.
Saniatan remains at large.
Cockerline, Waselchuck and Saniatan. I would give anything if I were creative enough to pull those names from the depth of my mind. And here I was fretting over Wendy Wickerson when the whole time she could have, plausibly, been called Wendy Waselchuck.
Of course, there needs to be a balance. As fun as names can be, they can also be a disservice to a story. They last thing I want is for a reader to hit a name and be ejected from the flow of the story. There’s a subtlety to planting a sobriquet on all of these “nobodies.”
But we do have a trick up our sleeves for sourcing names. And that trick is you, dear reader. Paid subscribers of this newsletter are granted the opportunity to have a character named after them. The good news is that there are plenty of nobodies in our book that could very quickly become somebodies by wearing your name.
Is this a gimmick? Some clever ploy to get you to subscribe?
No. It’s more about necessity, creative fatigue and the desire to build a community around this book.
So, help a couple scribblers out. Lend us hand. Lend us a name. We’d appreciate it more than you could possibly know.