Mystery and Detective Drama

Introduction

Because mystery fiction is primarily about creating suspense and tension, there may be no better form for this genre than drama. Dramas about murder date back to the beginning of the Western theater tradition, with plays by and . In the latter’s Oedipus Rex (c. 426 BCE), a king is murdered, and Oedipus takes it upon himself to unravel the mystery. The body of plays that follow dealing with murder and other crimes is enormous. To understand the development of modern popular mystery and detective drama, some crime play genres must be eliminated.

The great Greek and Elizabethan tragedies belong to a category of plays that deal primarily with a universal conflict in a serious manner. The central subject in such plays is not so much who committed crimes or who will catch the culprits as much as it is about the characters involved, their motivations for behavior, their own tragic flaws, and their reactions to the consequences of their crimes and their detection. The great dramatic tragedies intend to instruct as well as entertain. For example, the lesson from ’s play Hamlet (c. 1600-1601) is that revenge is as lethal as murder, as both lead to death and destruction.

After Shakespeare’s time, two other periods of drama produced plays of a similarly didactic nature—the decades between the two twentieth-century world wars and the postmodern era. Plays such as ’s Trifles (pr. 1916), ’s Machinal (pr. 1928), and ’s Winterset (pr. 1935) treated actual crimes in a manner that challenged audiences to examine the nature of crime itself, issues of gender-based expectations, and the consequences of revenge. Because of their complex mixtures of humor and tragedy, those plays are usually regarded as tragicomedies. Likewise, many postmodern and twenty-first-century plays dealing with murder deal with such critical social topics as hate crime, serial criminals, and rage violence. Examples include ’s Saved (pr. 1965), ’s Getting Out (pr. 1977) and ’night, Mother (pr. 1983), and ’s Glengarry Glen Ross (pr. 1984). All these plays typify the frank and confrontational nature of postmodern drama in dealing with the underlying questions about what motivates criminals and the individual consequences of their crimes.

Melodrama

Most plays dealing with crime are classified as melodrama, a form of dramatic literature that deals with individual conflicts in a sometimes serious, sometimes humorous manner, but that always has happy, or at least satisfying, endings. Melodrama became popular first in France in boulevard theatre, so called because of their location on the Boulevard du Temple, during the reign of Napoleon I, who placed tight restrictions on drama. The prolific French dramatist Pixerecourt (1773-1844) wrote more than 120 plays and is credited with developing the form and giving it its characteristic elements, which include virtuous heroes and heroines who are hounded by evil villains, forced to endure threats to their lives or reputations, and finally rescued for happy endings. The new genre gained fans across Europe and dominated the world of theater during the nineteenth century.

Melodrama depends upon the artificial building up of suspense by presenting all important action on stage, with little exposition, ending each act with a strong climax that leaves important questions unanswered. Early melodramas often used elaborate spectacles along with music and dancing. Plots include devices such as disguises, abductions, harrowing perils, and strict adherence to poetic justice. Villains are always punished and comic relief is usually offered by servants or friends of the main characters. In stage productions, music underscores important action to enhance the emotional impact, hence the term “melo-drama,” meaning literally, drama with melody, that is, music.

Because melodrama is much easier to write than classical tragedy or comedy, it flourished after its introduction to nineteenth-century theaters. Melodramas about murder, regardless of how serious the characters take their situations, almost always have elements of fun for their audiences—sometimes through humor, sometimes through terror, or possibly through the unraveling of puzzles—in much the same way a roller coaster creates the illusion of impending disaster yet always deposits its riders safely at the gate. Lack of serious intent or thought along with sensational special effects in stage productions gave melodrama so much appeal that it overshadowed other literary forms and catapulted the theater into a place of prominence in nineteenth-century society, making it the place to be and be seen.

Crime melodrama has been popular since its inception. However, detective-driven mysteries have emerged as the most enduring image in this broad genre. Before considering the origins of modern mystery dramas, it should be noted that “ mystery play,” as the term is used here, bears no relation to the religious mystery plays of the Middle Ages. A medieval “mystery play” is a dramatization of the life of Jesus as told in the Bible.

Beginnings

The earliest known play about a real murder, Murderous Michael (pr. 1578), by an unknown playwright, documented a domestic murder case that had occurred in England in 1550; it was performed for Queen Elizabeth I. The original manuscript is now lost, but another version of the play appeared in 1590, making it one of the earliest surviving examples of fact-based crime drama. Early in the seventeenth century, wrote his classic play about murder, The White Devil (pr. 1612), which dramatized actual events from nearly thirty years before. A century later, ’s The London Merchant (pr. 1731) dramatized the murder of George Barnwell, a young merchant’s apprentice who was murdered after being lured into crime by a prostitute. These early crime plays enjoyed long runs in London and have seen many revivals since. They demonstrated the popularity of crime drama, especially plays containing onstage violence, and they made possible the emergence of gothic thriller plays in the late eighteenth century that whetted the public’s voracious appetite for the macabre.

Gothic Drama

As the Age of Enlightenment drew to an end around the turn of the nineteenth century, European artists explored a variety of ideologies and produced some of the world’s greatest literature and music. However, little memorable drama came out of that era. The Romantic movement, which began in Germany, dominated much of the eighteenth century and gave rise to a renewed interest in the medieval period. This so-called gothic revival was largely inspired by ’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1765) and his play The Mysterious Mother (pr. 1768). Walpole initiated a gothic revival in literature and architecture that attempted to revive the spirit, if not the details, of gothic thought and design. Gothic fiction typically contains supernatural creatures, mysterious atmospheres, and run-down castles and old mansions with spiral staircases, grated windows, secret panels, hidden passageways, midnight bells, fluttering candles and fires, and dark, dank weather.

Gothic fiction is frequently about the disruptive return of the past into the present, and plots for gothic plays often incorporate long-lost relatives, buried family secrets, and concealed identities. The primary interest in these plays is not in defining characters or presenting the kinds of complications and reversals that playwrights generally try to create. Gothic plays seek to create mysterious horror for its own sake. In his study of gothic drama, Bertrand Evans argues that gothic plays share one primary purpose: to exploit mystery, gloom, and terror.

Gothic monsters presented a special problem for the leading actors of the early nineteenth century. They were usually the most interesting—though despicable—characters in gothic plays but typically appeared only briefly on stage. To satisfy the actors, a new type of villain had to be created, one who develops remorse for his crimes and redeems himself in the end with some grand gesture. No character from early nineteenth-century drama embodies this type of character better than the title character of Lord Byron’s Manfred (pr. 1817). A leading Romantic poet, Byron had more success as a playwright than most of his contemporaries, and the great actors of his time were drawn to his dastardly, yet vulnerable, leading characters and used them as vehicles to stardom.

Among the most enduring gothic monsters of nineteenth-century literature are ’s Count Dracula and ’s Phantom of the Opera. An “undead” creature who survives by drinking the blood of the living, Dracula first appeared as the title character in Stoker’s popular novel in 1897. The book took readers in Europe and the United States by storm and became one of the most famous gothic horror stories of all time. In 1927, Hamilton Deane brought Dracula to the stage in London, where his play ran for 391 performances and then continued an additional three years in the provinces, with nurses on hand to administer to the fainthearted. In a version slightly revised by John L. Balderston, Deane’s play also premiered on Broadway in 1927. It ran for 261 performances there and then went on tour. In 1930, the stage play was adapted to a film in which Bela Lugosi gave an indelible performance as Dracula. Deane’s play is still revived in the twenty-first century, and numerous versions of Dracula films have thrilled audiences for many years.

One of the most successful modern gothic plays is Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Phantom of the Opera, which opened in 1986 in London and in 1988 in New York, where the same production was still running almost twenty years later. The musical is based on Gaston Leroux’s novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910; The Phantom of the Opera, 1911), a story of a tortured “ghost”—actually a disfigured man whom no one ever actually sees—who lives beneath Paris’s great opera house and becomes obsessed with a beautiful singer. The story has been adapted to a number of plays, musicals, and films. Leroux’s story is itself an adaptation of the beloved French folktale “Beauty and the Beast.” The terror Leroux’s Phantom instills diminishes into compassion at the end, making the Phantom a tragic figure reminiscent of the great remorseful monsters of the early nineteenth century, such as Byron’s Manfred. Webber’s musical ranks as the highest-grossing entertainment event of all time, and its success demonstrates the ongoing popularity of gothic monsters even today.

Modern crime thrillers, especially those in the cinema, are direct descendants of gothic drama. Not only do they retain many of the conventional gothic trappings, but they also share the goal of creating the kind of nail-biting tension that generates a sense of constant danger and terror. When police detectives emerged as the dominant figures of mystery drama during the nineteenth century, the use of thriller elements subsided and took a secondary role to the detectives’ methodical and deliberate dissections of crimes.

Nineteenth-century Crime Melodrama

The first major shift toward modern detective plays was initiated by the American pioneer of detective fiction, . Poe himself wrote only one unpublished verse play, but his influence on crime fiction, including drama, is undeniable. His preoccupation with gothic horror stories is legendary; less well known are his stories that focus on his detective, C. Auguste Dupin, whom Poe modeled on a real-life French detective and used in three seminal stories. In addition to creating the detective figure, Poe also contributed the classic narrative time structure in which mystery stories—including plays—begin after murders have been committed.

Another writer who contributed to the rise of detective fiction was the English novelist , who was a fervent admirer of the London police and Scotland Yard inspectors. Dickens’s novel Bleak House (1852-1853) has a character named Inspector Bucket, whom Dickens modeled on a real London detective, Charles Field, whom he had studied and even accompanied on nightly rounds. Dickens’s writings are still widely read in the twenty-first century, and his stories continue to be frequently filmed. The musical play The Mystery of Edwin Drood, based on Dickens’s unfinished novel of the same title, opened on Broadway in 1985, enjoyed 604 performances, and won many awards, including an Edgar Award for its author, . Holmes’s adaptation respects the unfinished state of Dickens’s novel by allowing audiences at each performance to vote on its ending, which is then played out by the actors. Audiences are also invited to vote on the identity of the detective and which pair of characters will become romantically involved and thereby create a happy ending.

In addition to Dickens’s writings, the Victorian period also saw the birth of the sensation, or dime, novel. Inspired largely by ’s The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), sensation novels focused on the emotional trauma of their central characters—usually women—and stressed contrasts between innocence and guilt and between purity and sin. Collins adapted many of his novels into plays and was a close friend of Dickens.

The spread of mass education in Great Britain and the United States, combined with the development of public library systems to introduce new audiences to the joys of reading, and sensation novels answered the need for easy-to-read crime fiction. These books had four common characteristics—in addition to being inexpensive: murders, lawyers as narrators, professional police detectives who solve the crimes, and gradual introduction of clues that allowed readers to participate in the hunt for the killers. Two of the best sensation novels were Metta Victoria Fuller Victor’s The Dead Letter (1866) and ’s The Leavenworth Case (1878). Victor’s novel is considered by many literary historians to have been one of the first detective novels published in the United States.

The best play using the elements of a sensation novel was actually written more than fifty years after the period. Patrick Hamilton’s Angel Street (1938) revolves around a woman who is slowly being driven insane by her husband. Seeking to be rid of her without losing her money, the husband hopes to find the jewels of an elderly woman whom he murdered years earlier, but a detective eventually persuades the woman to help bring her murdering husband to justice. Although the play lacks a lawyer because no narrator is needed in drama, the other elements of a murder slowly unraveled by a detective fit the fundamental formula for Victorian sensation novels.

When Hamilton’s play was first produced in England, under the title Gaslight in 1938, it became an instant hit. In 1941, it was opened in New York, where it ran for more than three years. Its 1,295 performances made it one of the longest-running nonmusical plays in Broadway history. Moreover, it was a hit not only with the public but also with critics, one of whom called it a “masterpiece of suspense.” The play was made into two motion pictures: The Murder in Thornton Square (1940) in Great Britain and Gaslight (1944) in the United States. Often called the quintessential Victorian thriller, Hamilton’s play is still frequently revived.

Other successful quasi-Victorian thrillers written during this period include The Bat (1920) by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood and The Cat and the Canary (1922) by John Clawson Willard.

The Birth of the Modern Whodunit

The turn of the twentieth century marked the appearance of the first influential play about crime and detectives: Sherlock Holmes (pr. 1899) was written by William Gillette, who also played the lead role. It is difficult to determine who was more instrumental in shaping the play’s title character—Gillette or , who created Holmes in novels and short stories. Gillette’s play gave Holmes the outfit with which he became permanently associated and some of his most famous lines, such as “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Gillette based his play on Doyle’s character, but in playing Holmes in more than thirteen hundred performances throughout the United States; throughout Europe, South Africa, and Australia; and also on film, he created a portrayal of Holmes that has become more familiar to the public than that of Doyle’s own writings.

Although other plays used crafty detectives as protagonists, Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes was the first crime play to become an international sensation, thereby shifting crime melodrama from extravagant spectacle and gothic monsters to more realistic subject matter. This new approach would become the standard for dramatic “whodunit s” in the years ahead. Detective crime thrillers became much more successful than gothic monster plays and plays inspired by sensation novels. Nevertheless, they retained some of the latter’s most chilling gothic elements, such as an old mansion as setting, dark and gloomy weather, and dark family secrets that lead to murder. The melodramatic elements of thrilling climaxes, poetic justice, and even musical underscoring carried the detective drama genre through the twentieth century on stage and were even more evident in films.

The Golden Age of Detective Fiction

During the 1920s, , a writer often dubbed the “first lady of crime” and “queen of mystery,” began overshadowing other crime fiction writers. After a few stumbles in landing a publisher for her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles: A Detective Story (1920), she embarked on a career that would dominate twentieth-century mystery and detective fiction and leave a body of work few writers have come close to matching. Christie is known primarily for her mystery novels, but she also wrote poetry, short stories, and plays. Each of her two most famous detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, has a series of mystery novels that has been adapted to the screen many times. For many years, other playwrights dramatized Christie’s novels, and she collaborated on a few of them. Finally, in 1943, she won international fame with the first full-length play entirely of her own, Ten Little Niggers. Over the next nineteen years, she followed it with eleven more full-length plays and three one-act plays. Meanwhile, her first play, based on her 1939 novel of the same title, enjoyed great success in both London and New York. It was also adapted into four separate film versions. In 1945, Christie transformed one of her Poirot novels, Death on the Nile (1937), into a play that ran on a London stage as Murder on the Nile and later on Broadway as Hidden Horizon. Her greatest dramatic success, however, was The Mousetrap (pr. 1952), which she adapted from her novella Three Blind Mice (1948).

The Mousetrap revolves around a young couple who have just opened a boardinghouse in a town where a grisly murder has just taken place. While a blizzard prevents them and their guests from leaving and from even phoning out, a murder takes place. No one can leave the house, but a police detective arrives on skis and begins an investigation. The only possible murder suspects appear to be the boarders, and eventually, it is established that the murderer is a young man who has returned to his hometown to kill everyone he thinks is responsible for the death of his brother. This play is typical of Christie’s prose writing in presenting a collection of colorful characters, all of whom might reasonably be suspected of murder. Also, like Christie’s fiction, the play concludes by revealing the murderer to be the least likely suspect of them all. The play flopped in New York, but it was an astounding success in London, where it became the longest-running play of any type in history. In 2007, the play completed its fifty-fifth continuous year and showed no sign of closing.

Christie’s strengths in playwriting are her careful plotting and her putting action before character. According to her biographers, she took up writing plays because of her dissatisfaction with the way in which others had dramatized her prose. She understood the requirements of dramatic structure better than most novelists and believed, perhaps ironically, that other writers tried to remain too true to her original works. In her autobiography, she explains that novels have so many characters and intricate plots that keeping them all in plays would confuse audiences. She thought that plays should present their stories in simpler, tightly focused plots.

Christie’s second most successful play was Witness for the Prosecution (pr. 1953), which did better in New York than in London. Her other important plays include Spider’s Web (pr. 1954), Towards Zero (pr. 1956), Verdict (pr. 1958), The Unexpected Guest (pr. 1958), Go Back for Murder (pr. 1960), and Rule of Three (pr. 1962). Many of her novels and plays were also adapted to the screen.

A different kind of crime play that emerged during the mid-twentieth century was the comic murder mystery. The best example of this form is Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace (pr. 1941), which ran for several years in both New York and London and was filmed in 1944. A charming and often hilarious story about the elderly Brewster sisters, who poison lonely old men and bury them in their basement, it combines farce with the suspense of a murder mystery wrapped into a single pleasing melodrama.

Detective Plays in the Postmodern Era

The United States and Europe experienced convulsive political and social upheavals during the mid-twentieth century, and the tidy endings and false sense of poetic justice that characterized melodrama lost their appeal in dramatic works. Playwrights wanted to stretch their imaginations, and audiences craved the kinds of spectacles and special effects they saw in films. In the United States, mainstream commercial theater, which was centered on Broadway, turned to the developing musical comedy form for survival, and serious plays were generally relegated to Off-Broadway and experimental theaters. Plays written during the 1960s had an altogether different tone. Playwrights wanted to show the ugly undersides of domestic life, politics, crime, and other aspects of human life. The postmodern period had arrived.

The first play to offer a totally new approach to the crime genre was Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, which opened in London in 1968. It ushered in a new kind of murder mystery play, the postmodern comedy thriller. Comic murder mystery plays had been seen before, most notably in Arsenic and Old Lace. However, the crime thrillers of the late twentieth century had far more sinister tones than the play about the murderous Brewster sisters. These plays take good advantage of the predictability of traditional detective plays by poking fun at the well-known formula. Although these plays are not simply about murders and mysteries, they use these elements to make broader statements on subjects such as marital infidelity, revenge, or power. Moreover, their humor is of a very different nature from that of the earlier comic thrillers. It is more seriocomic and socially aware, with more emphasis on satire than pure comedy. Finally, the element of surprise is paramount in creating their humor and revealing the plays’ content.

In Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, a play-within-a-play, two feuding newspaper critics, Moon and Birdboot, meet at a theater to review the latest Agatha Christie-style murder mystery. They carry on a conversation that continues after the play they are watching begins. Before any characters step on stage, a phone rings and Birdboot leaves his seat to answer it. Before he can return to his seat, he becomes entangled in the stage play’s plot, taking on the character of Inspector Hound. Moon is also eventually pulled into the action. Both critics end up being killed and are replaced in the stalls by the actors playing the roles they have assumed. This play is clearly not written merely for entertainment; it also makes an artistic statement about the role of critics in the theater. It received enthusiastic responses from the public and critics alike, but because it was only an extended one-act production, it was usually billed with other short plays and never achieved a commanding run on its own.

The first full-length comedy thriller to achieve significant success was ’s Sleuth (pr. 1970). This murder mystery has many of the standard elements of conventional detective stories, which it uses in order to parody them. In his study of the postmodern thriller, Marvin Carlson points out that Sleuth is “double-coded,” a technique typical of postmodern writing. One set of codes encourages audiences to accept the play as a traditional detective mystery. However, a second set of codes is provided by one character, and sometimes all the characters, commenting on the convention being portrayed. The play thus becomes a self-conscious examination of the characters, the plot, and the play itself.

Sleuth is really a match of wits between a middle-aged man and his wife’s young lover. The game between the two of them provides the main plot conflict and leads the audience through a series of surprises colored by an increasingly sadistic jousting for power. In the end, neither character wins, but one of them dies. Sleuth was an instant hit in London and played for more than three years on Broadway, where it won a Tony Award for Best Play in 1971. The 1972 film version of the play also won audience and critical success, and Shaffer won an Edgar Award for his screenplay. Playwright collaborated with Shaffer in a revised screenplay for a new film adaptation that was completed in 2007.

Other significant comedy thrillers of the late twentieth century include ’s Deathtrap (pr. 1978), Walter Peter Marks’s The Butler Did It (pr. 1981), and Francis Durbridge’s Deadly Nightcap (pr. 1986). These and other plays contain so much comic invention that perhaps the only thing predictable in them is their authors’ attempts to misdirect, surprise, and thwart audiences at every turn. The interesting element for the audience is not whodunit, but howdunit. The murderers are usually known to audiences early on; how they will perpetrate their crimes constitutes the mystery. The endings of comedy thrillers must be satisfying yet inverted, and denouements in which order is not established and the mystery/thriller conventions have been successfully dismantled.

Twenty-first-century Trends

Later murder mysteries and thrillers have suffered from the genre’s history. Plays written in the traditional thriller or mystery mode must compete with the success of their forerunners, especially Agatha Christie’s well-known works. Having exhausted nearly all possible plot twists, postmodern thrillers virtually ceased to exist in the twenty-first century. There are limits to how many plays can be built around clever killers who murder people, only to have them come back to life to exact revenge and then discover their guns have blanks because the original killers anticipated what would happen. Audiences expecting mind-boggling arrays of twists and turns become more involved in the game of the play than in the plots of such plays.

In the twenty-first century, murder-mystery musicals and whodunit dinners have tended to take the place of modern traditional crime drama. In whodunit dinners, murder mysteries are audience participation games used for pure entertainment. Indeed, the crime drama genre has become so “camp” that only period revivals of old plays, such as Angel Street, permit audiences a credible suspension of disbelief that will allow them to get involved with the characters and plot. More modern crime plays rarely do anything new or interesting with the genre. Perhaps when a formula is so familiar that it serves primarily as the subject of satire, as in the postmodern comedy thrillers, it must either stagnate into extinction or reinvent itself.

Primarily a result of COVID-19 quarantine protocols, A Killer Party: A Murder Mystery Musical began in 2020 as a virtual collaboration of fifty talented Broadway playwrights, musicians, producers, performers, and other contributors. This modern mystery production provided new and exciting content for at-home viewers. The nine-episode musical series was remotely performed, self-filmed, and streamed on Vimeo. Born of necessity, the digital musical displayed the dynamic nature of modern drama and highlighted the importance of connecting with the stage theater audience through social media and other digital means. Another modern play, Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe (2008), continues to be reproduced in various theaters in the twenty-first century. The true crime plot and musical take on an interesting historical event appeal to a variety of modern theatergoers.

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