October 2022 How to write a murder mystery by Jennifer Rigby
IF you are currently considering writing a murder mystery, my first piece of advice would be… don’t! It’s time consuming, incredibly challenging and you will have to research things that put you in danger of being investigated by the police!
I recently wrote ‘Murder most Wicked’ for an event in October. We released the titles of our two murder mysteries for this year in January, so I didn’t really know what this one was going to be about! Initially I had considered setting it in the staffroom of a school for witches and wizards, but this started to lean too closely towards Hogwarts and as I had already used Maggie Smith as inspiration for my character in ‘Murder most Choral’ I decided to change the theme… but not totally! A childhood obsession with magic gave me my next idea; I would set this event at a conference for Magicians, because that would be easy right? WRONG!
At first, I brainstormed some ideas – I had done a kids show about science in which some diamonds were stolen by, oh hang on, I can’t tell you any more about this #spoiler. Because we get a lot of returning audience members to our murder mystery events, they all need to be very different, so this gave me the idea of having not one but two crimes.
Then I had various sketchy ideas, we had used a shadow suit in ‘Peter Pan’ could we use that, sword swallowing was an early idea, mistaken identity would give me the idea for two characters, bullied assistant (too obvious perhaps?) maybe we could have a red herring in the form of a contortionist hidden in a case, but since none of the cast possessed this particular skill, I had to discount this idea fairly swifty!
Whilst procrastinating I watched a TV Murder Mystery called ‘Murder on the Blackpool Express’ starring Johnny Vegas, Sian Gibson, Griff Rhys Jones and Una Stubbs (to name just a few of the star-studded cast) this gave me quite a few superb comedy lines to magpie, but not much inspiration in terms of plot.
So, then I started researching simple magic tricks, YouTube has a very helpful video entitled ’10 tricks to do at home’, I was quite excited to learn about tricks using Gallium until I researched the price and once again, had to return to the drawing board.
Quite often the names of the characters lead me to start thinking about who they are and what they could do to either encourage someone to murder them, or to commit a murder so I Googled ‘good names for magicians’! And so, using names that were all to do with magic or mysticism, Magico Fantastico, Ody Arcanum, The Omini Twins and Misty Pendragon were born! I write for the actors who will be playing the parts, and so very quickly their characters began to take shape
And that’s when the real researching began. Amongst many other things I researched: Stephen Mulhern’s catch phrase, mind manipulation, The Magic Circle, Harry Houdini, Harry Corbett and Sooty, how many magicians have died on stage, how many magicians have been murdered and finally Debbie McGee’s right leg!
I also had to find out as much information I could about a member of the audience for a Derren Brown type trick and this was when I discovered how disturbingly easy it is to ‘stalk’ someone online! Right down to the colour of their garage. Now, mistakenly, I chose someone in the audience who had exactly the same name as someone else in the audience, so this could have all gone really wrong! In the end, I spoke to one of their friends to check that they would be alright with all of this, they were and thought it was all hilarious.
We also got permission to ‘steal’ a Halloween post-box topper from the incredibly talented creators, this action needed two different moments that I found absolutely terrifying! First, I had to steal the topper, then I had to return to the scene of the crime with a ransom note! My blood pressure was through the roof as I know how protective our community is over these wonderful, crocheted decorations. Thankfully, no one saw me. However, the amount of people on Facebook who claimed they ‘know who it is but I’m not telling’ was really funny!
Our previous two Murder Mysteries were, admittedly, quite complex in terms of murder and motive so I tried to make this one as easy (and obvious) as possible. And yet, our over-thinking Detectives came up with the most random plots, back stories and relationships; in fact, we now have two prizes, one for the team who come closest to solving the murder and one for the team with the most amusing motive for the crime!
So, if you are ever in the audience of a Murder Mystery, notice everything, listen to everything the characters say, because every word has been chosen carefully and then… go for the simplest answer or failing that, create a plot as absurd as you can and you might just win a bottle of bubbly!
Interested in booking a murder mystery? Head to our Murder Mystery page!
