Dying Onstage: Performance, Theater, and Deception in Classic Murder Mysteries

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“Wherever there is human nature, there is drama.”

–Hercule Poirot in “The King of Clubs,” by Agatha Christie

I often think of murder mysteries and magic tricks as complementary art forms. Both feature a “performer” attempting to bamboozle an audience via elaborate methods of good-natured deception. That has been my underlying principle when writing my first two books, Death and the Conjuror and The Murder Wheel. In fact, The Murder Wheel is mainly set backstage in a fictional London theatre – the Pomegranate. I love the theatre in all its myriad forms, from the classical to the commercial to the experimental, so I suppose you could say it’s my second great passion (after the Golden Age locked-room mystery). With that in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why exactly the theatre is such fertile ground for crime writers. 

I believe there are several practical reasons, not least of which is the fact that the setting offers an unlikely collection of characters and personality clashes under one roof, which lends itself neatly to creating a closed circle of suspects. But the theatre is also a place of high passions, not to mention deception and intrigue.   

Whatever the rationale behind it, though, there’s no getting away from the fact that theatre and mystery go hand in hand. Just look at Agatha Christie, who remains the best-selling crime writer in history.  As well as several titles taken from Shakespeare (Sad Cypress, Taken at the Flood, By the Pricking of my Thumbs, plus the pseudonymous romance novel Absent in the Spring), many of the Bard’s favourite themes are also present in her work: revenge, witchcraft, and disguise, to name a few. Likewise thespians and other “theatrical types” take frequent prominent roles; case in point Poirot’s chum Sir Charles Cartwright in Three Act Tragedy (1934), and Jane Wilkinson in Lord Edgeware Dies (1933). 

But this sense of theatricality not only informs the style and characterisation of Christie’s work, but also in many cases the plots. Impersonation and mistaken identity, for instance, are often employed as part of ingenious murder schemes; in some cases even gender-bending akin to Twelfth Night or As You Like It.

And of course Christie was also a playwright herself; her drama The Mousetrap remains to this day the longest-running theatrical production of any kind in the world, and has been playing for over seventy years in London’s West End. Ultimately a rather conventional whodunit, the play has nonetheless attained mythic status thanks to its unprecedented longevity. This is reflected in the recent cinematic outing See How They Run, a comic caper with charming performances from Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan, which sees a murder mystery unfolding backstage during the first London production of the play. Though ultimately unsuccessful as a mystery, the film nonetheless has its charms – not least of which is the obvious affection for Christie’s play and for the Golden Age conventions of the crime genre.

But what exactly are the direct correlations between mystery and theatre as art forms? W.H. Auden’s famous essay “The Guilty Vicarage” draws a clear comparison between the murder mystery and the classical Greek tragedy, as defined in Aristotle’s Poetics. Both, says Auden, are narratives of concealment (i.e. the concealment of a murderer’s identity) and manifestation (i.e. the eventual identification of the culprit). Peripeteia connotes a reversal of fortune, a drastic or ironic change in circumstances; effectively a shift in narrative direction, or a “plot twist,” which is such a vital element of crime fiction. Auden defines it in a crime fiction context thus: “a double reversal from apparent guilt to innocence and from apparent innocence to guilt.” 

Another key Aristotelian dramatic principle is anagnorisis, a term referring to a moment of realisation; of a character comprehending the “true nature” of something. Consider Othello’s final, dreadful understanding of Iago’s betrayal, and the realisation that he has murdered the blameless Desdemona for nothing. The dramatic impetus in such a scene has much in common with, for example, the denouement of a conventional Golden Age country house mystery, wherein the suspects are gathered and the solution to the puzzle at long last revealed. Broadly speaking, the two disparate forms of literature actually follow similar emotional and thematic trajectories. 

But the comparisons don’t end there. It’s also worth looking at the archetypal Golden Age mystery narrative through the lens of Brechtian dramatic theory. Bertolt Brecht, unquestionably one of the most influential dramatists of the 20th century, used so-called “distancing effects” to defamiliarize the stock characters of classical drama. The intention was to encourage a more active intellectual engagement from audiences, not allowing them to fall back on old conventions and stereotypes. Golden Age mystery fiction also plays with the notion of stock characters, with certain recurring “types” who are readily recognisable to the eagle-eyed reader. The eccentric aunt, for instance, or the absent-minded clergyman. However, the knowledge of a killer hiding among them places the reader in a similar defamiliarized position to Brecht’s audiences: we are encouraged to question our preconceptions, to scrutinize the mannerisms and behaviours we might otherwise have taken for granted. In short, to question everything. 

This notion of active engagement on the part of the audience is particularly prevalent in the works of Ellery Queen. Queen novels frequently present a “Challenge to the Reader,” designed to encourage reader participation in the unravelling of the puzzle. Such direct appeals from author signify a breaking down of traditional narrative boundaries, as well as an acute sense of self-awareness that borders on metafiction. 

Taking this notion further, classic mysteries often feature discourses on the nature of the mystery as a literary form, further demonstrating that self-awareness which is inherent in the Brechtian model. Take for instance the immortal moment in John Dickson Carr’s magnificent The Hollow Man (1935; titled The Three Coffins in America) where the sleuth, Dr. Gideon Fell, declares: “we’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not.”

Perhaps all of this goes some way toward explaining the appeal of the theatrical milieu as a setting in classic crime fiction. Other notable examples from the height of the Golden Age include Michael Innes’s Hamlet, Revenge! (1937), a brilliant early entry in his John Appleby series. Interestingly, one of the book’s most unlikely legacies was the name “Edmund Crispin,” which was appropriated by Innes aficionado Robert Bruce Montgomery for his own mystery writing career. Under the Crispin name, Montgomery wrote several excellent mysteries, many of which are themselves highly theatrical – almost farcical – in their construction. The first is The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), the title of which is an allusion to King Lear, which sees a theatrical company in wartime Oxford dogged by murder. Another overtly stagy Crispin novel is Love Lies Bleeding (1948), which is set close to Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, and features a previously lost Shakespeare manuscript as the catalyst for a murder plot.

Other excellent examples include Christianna Brand’s Death of Jezebel (1949), which uses the stage as a setting for an impossible crime, with the murder committed in full view of an audience. The book is a remarkable achievement which has (thankfully) been reissued here in the UK as part of the remarkably successful British Library Crime Classics series. Then there is Derek Smith, a considerably more obscure name, whose Come to Paddington Fair (written circa 1950s, unpublished in English until 2015) also features a murder committed in front of an audience. Smith is a woefully underappreciated plotsmith, and Come to Paddington Fair deserves a much wider audience – not least for its artful evocation of the backstage melodrama which presages the murder.

Moving forward in time, P.D. James is another towering figure of British crime to engage with the theatrical in her work. Featuring her private detective character Cordelia Gray, The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982) takes its name from a line by T.S. Eliot, who was describing the bloodthirsty preoccupations of Jacobean dramatist John Webster. The novel sees Gray drawn into the lives of Sir George Ralston and his enigmatic wife Clarissa Lisle, an ageing actress who is about to take on the lead role in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Although published in 1982, this novel is James at her most Christie-like. Here, the theatrical milieu provides a sense of both timelessness and nostalgia that belie the psychological preoccupations that take precedence elsewhere in her work.

More comic in tone are Simon Brett’s novels featuring the actor-turned-detective Charles Paris. The first, Cast In Order of Disappearance (1975), is glorious fun, and finds Charles adopting an unlikely disguise in pursuit of the murderer of a hated theatrical tycoon. This highly entertaining series has been successfully adapted into a number of BBC radio dramas featuring the brilliant (and Oscar-nominated) Bill Nighy, who utterly embodies the dry wit and world-weariness of Charles. 

Of course, the theatrical mystery is certainly not unique to the British Isles. Indeed, I couldn’t discuss them without at least mentioning Ngaio Marsh. Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, Marsh would go on to achieve global fame for her long-running series of murder mysteries featuring the suave, erudite sleuth Roderick Alleyn – his surname borrowed from Elizabethan actor Edward “Ned” Alleyn. Of the 33 Alleyn mysteries, a disproportionate number feature theatrical settings, actors, playwrights and allusions to the Bard. Indeed, it could be argued that every one of them carries a sense of theatricality in its style and execution. That’s because Marsh was herself an actor, director and impresario who rejuvenated the theatre industry in New Zealand virtually single-handed. 

The second of the Alleyn mysteries, Enter a Murderer (1935), sets out her stall nicely: it features the now-hoary gambit of the prop gun replaced by a real one, leading to the death of an actor mid-performance. Other notable examples include Death at the Dolphin (1966), the “Dolphin” being a renovated London theatre which houses a rather unusual McGuffin: a glove which supposedly belonged to Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet. 

Unlike her contemporary Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh’s powers never waned. Her later novels remain as strong as the early ones – in some cases, stronger. And her very last, Light Thickens (published in 1982, long after the end of the “Golden Age”), is as brilliant a book as any she wrote. It takes us back to the Dolphin Theatre, and to an ill-fated production of Macbeth. Here, Marsh’s passion for the theatre positively springs from the page, as does her canniness as a plotter. It is a perfect swansong.

And there are plenty of theatrical escapades to be found in the United States, too. The very first Ellery Queen novel, The Roman Hat Mystery (1929), is set in a Broadway theatre, and sees a murder committed not onstage this time but in the audience. Though the novel leaves something to be desired in its prose style (which is far too reminiscent of the worst excesses of S.S. Van Dine), its plot is top-notch, and shows considerable promise of the greatness that the series would attain during its lengthy duration. 

The “Ellery Queen” duo, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, also wrote a quartet of stagy mysteries under the pseudonym “Barnaby Ross.” Like the Queen novels, these are all based in and around NYC, and feature the retired actor Drury Lane in the role of amateur sleuth and master of disguise. The four books are all of a very high standard, with The Tragedy of Y (1932) a particular standout, but I believe the final work – Drury Lane’s Last Case (1933) – to be of particular interest because, like the aforementioned Crispin novel, it also deals with an investigation into a supposedly lost Shakespeare play. 

In the mould of Ellery Queen, “Patrick Quentin” was another pseudonym employed by multiple writers. The most long-standing of these was Hugh Wheeler, whose hand in co-writing the Peter Duluth mysteries under the P.Q. moniker saw frequent fictional forays into the world of Broadway theatre, with Puzzle for Players (1938) a particular highlight. In it, Duluth’s theatrical comeback is dogged by bad luck and a string of deaths.

As an author, Hugh Wheeler was able to draw considerably from his personal experience in the world of the theatre, and would eventually abandon crime fiction to write the books for not one but three Stephen Sondheim musicals during the 1970s: A Little Night Music, Candide and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

The collaboration between Wheeler and Sondheim is significant because Stephen Sondheim too nurtured a deep fascination for puzzle mysteries. Indeed, one of his rare non-musical endeavours was the remarkable collaboration with the actor Anthony Perkins that yielded the utterly brilliant 1973 mystery classic The Last of Sheila. The film is a stone-cold classic, and an absolute must-watch for any self-respecting mystery aficionado. In spite of that, neither of the duo’s other mystery projects ever took off, but Sondheim and Perkins nonetheless remain vital “fringe” figures in the world of 20th century mystery. Indeed, even as recently as 2022 Rian Johnson paid homage to Sheila in his own highly entertaining Glass Onion. 

So what does all this tell us about the theatre, and about the mystery genre? Simply that they are a perfect fit for one another: in both cases the fundamental aim is to show the audience something exciting, something challenging, something to get the blood flowing and the synapses fizzing. To enthuse. To engage. That is the raison d’etre of both the mystery genre and of live theatre – and it is also the reason they make such excellent bedfellows.

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SOURCES:

Aristotle, Poetics

W.H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage”

Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theatre Is The Epic Theatre”

 

RECOMMENDED READING FOR THEATRE LOVERS:

Christianna Brand, Death of Jezebel

Simon Brett, Cast In Order of Disappearance

Christopher Bush, Death of a Tudor Queen

Agatha Christie, Three Act Tragedy

Edmund Crispin, The Case of the Gilded Fly

Elizabeth Daly, Unexpected Night

Antonia Fraser, Cool Repentance

Carolyn Hart, Something Wicked

Reginald Hill, Bones and Silence

Anthony Horowitz, The Twist of a Knife

Michael Innes, Hamlet, Revenge!

P.D. James, The Skull Beneath the Skin

Peter Lovesey, Stagestruck

Ngaio Marsh, Enter a Murderer

Helen McCloy, Cue For Murder

Barnaby Ross, Drury Lane’s Last Case

Featured image: William Hogarth, David Garrick as Richard III

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