Frederick Knott wrote three plays during his career. These were clever mysteries, carefully plotted, with whiplash twists. Two, his first and his last, became all-time classic films: Dial M for Murder and Wait Until Dark. This left me with the question: what about the one in the middle?
Write Me a Murder began its life with great promise. It ran for a decent 196 performances on Broadway, starring James Donald, Denholm Elliot and Kim Hunter. It won the 1962 Edgar for Best Mystery Play.
Dial M for Murder was filmed by Hitchcock and stands at the lower end of his top tier films. It has been filmed repeated times in slightly variant forms.
Wait Until Dark was filmed by Terrence Young, a veteran director, best know for this film and three of the four original Bond movies, providing Audrey Hepburn with one of her classic roles.
Write Me a Murder never made it beyond television productions, the first for BBC's Thursday Theater in 1964, and a second by the Australian Broadcasting Company in 1965. Neither have gained the minimum five votes to be rated on IMDB.
From time to time it gets revived in small and moderate-sized theaters, and, coincidentally, there is a current staging going on at Person Playhouse in Pacific Palisades. (Probably produced by Peter Piper.)
And that's it. It has never returned to Broadway or off-Broadway as far as I can find. This intrigued me. I had to investigate, so I ordered a copy of the acting edition.
The story plays out as follows (no major spoilers).
Although the Rodingham estate has been in family hands for 500 years, financial pressures force the heir, Clive Rodingham, to sell. The buyer is a crass businessman, Charles Sturrock, who has secret plans to chop-up the estate and convert the acreage into suburban housing.
Clive's brother, David, writes mysteries. David discovers that Sturrock's wife, Julia shares this and–soon enough–other passions. Together David and Julia write a story about the perfect murder. When they decide to use the plot to kill her husband, they burn the drafts.
Of course there are some twists between the murder plans and the murderers living happily ever after.
So, what's the verdict? Is this play the poor relation of its famous siblings or is it equal in quality?
Write Me a Murder is only available for reading as a stage play. This relegates the action to stage directions. Being a clockwork mystery I found myself struggling to visualize "cross to chair A," while wondering if this direction was significant to the murder. It wasn't.
That aside, Knott has a distinct and economical way of drawing characters. Consider the line "world's champion blind lady" from Wait Until Dark and you know deep down she is tougher than the killers. When Julia tells David she has written twenty stories over seven years and not one was published, David remarks that she must be a real writer: anyone else would have given up.
The story is compelling, richly plotted. There was one major coincidence/twist that drove the plot that I felt was deux ex machina and a couple of minor plot holes which could easily be fixed in an adaptation. I haven't read the play treatments of Dial M for Murder or Wait Until Dark. Maybe minor glitches were repaired in the screenplays.
Those are quibbles. My final verdict is that Write Me a Murder is worthy of a major revival or a screen treatment. For those who love clever mysteries it is an unjustly neglected masterpiece.
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| Kim Hunter and Denholm Elliot, original Broadway production. |
Martin Hill Ortiz is the author of Never Kill A Friend, Ransom Note Press.
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| Never Kill A Friend, Ransom Note Press |
Never Kill A Friend is available for purchase in hard cover format and as an ebook.
The story follows Shelley Krieg, an African-American detective for the Washington DC Metro PD as she tries to undo a wrong which sent an innocent teenager to prison.
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Martin Hill Ortiz is also the author of A Predator's Game. His epic poem, Two Mistakes, recently won second place in the Margaret Reid/Tom Howard Poetry Competition. He can be contacted at mdhillortiz@gmail.com.