Forget the butler: the dresser did it. Not necessarily, but dressers--stage actors' best friends--are on the scene for a suspiciously large number of murders in the impeccably written and hair-raising British Library Crime Classics collection Final Acts: Theatrical Mysteries, edited by series consultant Martin Edwards (The Golden Age of Murder; The Puzzle of Blackstone Lodge).
The book's 14 theater-set stories date from 1905 to 1958, overlapping with the golden age of detective fiction and reinforcing its fine reputation. In Marguerite Steen's "In View of the Audience" (1934), a man who has taken the wrong train meets a fellow rider who invites him to come see his recently purchased theater, which has a dark history: there was once a murder onstage that the audience thought was part of the show. In Brandon Fleming's "The Wrong Make-Up," a theater actor with a slew of enemies mysteriously takes ill and dies in his dressing room, his face grotesquely plastered with stage makeup.
In several stories, someone is disguised by a costume; as Edwards points out in his introduction, the identity-concealment possibility offered by an actor's stage dress can't help but make the theatrical setting attractive to crime writers. Another appeal: as the chief constable in Roy Vickers's "The Lady Who Laughed" (1948) learns, probably the hard way, "Actors never betray themselves with involuntary movements of body, hands or face." And in Dorothy L. Sayers's "Blood Sacrifice" (1936), it's noted that death is simply "good theatre." So is Final Acts. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer