Theatrical Murders, and a Trial in Three Acts

Trial in Three Acts by Guy Morpuss

published 2025

+ many other theatrical books

 

I have often mentioned how much I enjoy books with theatrical settings, particularly mysteries.  Reading a recent contemporary book, I realized that I have an even more niche preference. And that is, crimes where a performance includes a prop/fake gun, knife or other weapon. And - and of course we see this coming a long way off - there is a substitution. A real weapon is in place, and someone dies.

Trial in Three Acts by Guy Morpuss (2025) has a particularly choice version of this – it’s what made me buy the book. A historical play is being performed every night in the spooky and atmospheric chapel in a London cemetery, beside the preserved body of one of the characters.

A cross carved into a stone wall. A broken stone angel resting in a corner

 

The play ends in the guillotining of an actor, and a clever and elaborate prop has been designed. But one night it goes badly wrong.

Well! I couldn’t resist that setup, and the book did not disappoint. It’s more of a legal thriller than a theatre mystery – the hero/sleuth is a barrister called in at the last minute to handle the defence of the prime suspect. Charles Konig is an excellent character, and he is working with an American solicitor, Yara, who is a full-on personality. Their relationship is charming, the plot is elaborate, the final pages very compelling. I certainly hope the book is the start of a new series…

The play in the book is partly set during the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, so I will also mention the Poulenc opera, Dialogues des Carmelites, set in the same era. No mystery element, but the opera ends with the singing nuns processing to be executed one by one, with the repeated thump of the guillotine sounding offstage. At least, it was offstage in the performance that I saw – I think it’s director’s choice how to stage this. It is stark and horrifying, with fewer and fewer voices singing as the nuns meet their fate.

French Revolution featured in a couple of posts last year.

Some more murderous theatricals:

 

An early Agatha Christie short story called Swan Song, 1926, which has a performance of Tosca – ideal for these purposes, and so not hard to work out what is going on, or the parallel plots of opera and story. (Edmund Crispin’s Swan Song is set around an opera performance, but death in the dressing room. I note that my post on it is much more interested in Salome, which is only a short anecdote in the book)

Ngaio Marsh’s Enter a Murderer I said in a blogpost “Absolutely splendid setup: during a performance of a thriller, the fake bullets in a gun have been replaced by real ones, so an actor is shot and killed onstage during the play. Who could have had the opportunity to do the switch? (As in so many of these books, just about everyone had a motive.)”  Marsh always does theatrical settings particularly well.

Helen McCloy’s Cue for Murder – two posts – doesn’t quite meet the criterion of the fake weapon, but does have a brilliantly unusual and clever setup – there is a character hidden from view throughout most of the play, and eventually he turns out to be dead. But who is he, and how did this happen? Intricate and intriguing.

 

Simon Brett’s Charles Paris books – the adventures of a fading actor – all blend into one with me now, but surely must have featured the substituted weapon trope somewhere?

Two years ago, Chrissie Poulson and I both did lists of theatrical books (by no means all mysteries) so do check them out for more suggestions. (Note that Chrissie herself has written an excellent theatrical mystery, Stage Fright.)

 

CHRISTINE POULSON Ten novels set in the theatre - CHRISTINE POULSON

 

Thursday List – Books with Theatrical Settings

 

But – I am also expecting that my keen readers are now searching their memories for more examples of this trope – please add them in the comments below.

Or any other good theatrical plots – one of the books mentioned above has arsenic in a make-up cream, while the recent Dancers in Mourning has a pin in the greasepaint stick.

A good line would be someone drinking something on stage and being poisoned…surely there is a book somewhere…

Michael Innes’ Hamlet Revenge! has a murder during a theatrical performance (guess which play?) and there’s an opera death in Ellis Peters’ Funeral of Figaro.

Gladys Mitchell’s Death at the Opera is a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan. Measure for Murder by Clifford Witting is about an amdram group putting on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Exit Charlie by Alex Atkinson has a very convincing picture of provincial rep theatre in the 1950s, as well as murder.

This is only a small selection, even, of the theatrical books featured here on the blog.

 

Kensal Green Cemetery photo by Matt Hucke from Wikimedia Commons

Other cemetery photo(s) by my favourite photographer, Denise Perry, on  Instagram here.

The group of theatricals is from a performance of Andre Chenier, an opera set during the time of the French Revolution, and giving a vague idea of the play within Trial in Three Acts.. The opera featured in the French Revolution post.

The engraving is by Hogarth and shows  ‘The Idle 'Prentice at Play in the Church Yard during Divine Service’ which again isn’t exactly right, but with a leap of the imagination certainly has a look of all the shenanigans in the chapel at the cemetery and the stage paraphernalia.

File:William Hogarth - Plate 3, The Idle ^Prentice at Play in the Church Yard during Divine Service - B2019.24.53 - Yale Center for British Art.jpg - Wikimedia Commons