the eventual identification of the culprit). the concealment of a murderer’s identity) and manifestation (i.e. Both, says Auden, are narratives of concealment (i.e. 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. 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.īut what exactly are the direct correlations between mystery and theatre as art forms? W.H. 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. Ultimately a rather conventional whodunit, the play has nonetheless attained mythic status thanks to its unprecedented longevity. Īnd 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. 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.
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).īut this sense of theatricality not only informs the style and characterisation of Christie’s work, but also in many cases the plots.
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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. Just look at Agatha Christie, who remains the best-selling crime writer in history. Whatever the rationale behind it, though, there’s no getting away from the fact that theatre and mystery go hand in hand. But the theatre is also a place of high passions, not to mention deception and intrigue. 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. With that in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why exactly the theatre is such fertile ground for crime writers. 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). In fact, The Murder Wheel is mainly set backstage in a fictional London theatre – the Pomegranate.
That has been my underlying principle when writing my first two books, Death and the Conjuror and The Murder Wheel. Both feature a “performer” attempting to bamboozle an audience via elaborate methods of good-natured deception.
I often think of murder mysteries and magic tricks as complementary art forms. –Hercule Poirot in “The King of Clubs,” by Agatha Christie “Wherever there is human nature, there is drama.”
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