Courtroom Theatrics by Guy Morpuss

The actor Philip Glenister (Life on Mars and Mad Dogs) advised his daughter: ‘If you want to be an actor and earn some money, become a barrister.’

With the state of legal aid, most criminal barristers would question the wisdom of that advice. It does however highlight the close links between acting and the law. Many barristers would like to make the opposite journey and be treading the boards in the West End.

A trial is rather like a play. We wear our costumes. We perform to the audience. And on a good day no one gets murdered.

That is the tag line for my new novel, A Trial in Three Acts, where the worlds of the theatre and law collide. An actress is murdered live on stage, her head chopped off with a guillotine. Suspicion falls on all cast members, but it is her ex-husband, Hollywood superstar Leo Lusk, who is charged with her murder. At his Old Bailey trial, he is defended by English barrister Charles Konig KC, and New York trial lawyer Yara Ortiz. They realise that the clues to the murder lie in the play itself, and that to save their client they need to identify the real murderer.

When, more than thirty years ago, I started out as a barrister, I thought that winning cases was about persuading the judge that you were right on the law. Over time, and particularly after I became a KC, I began to realise that the law has very little to do with the outcome of most trials. In truth barristers win cases by telling the judge a better story than the other side. Every trial is a one-off performance for an audience of one. Judges are human, and you win by showing the judge why they should want to decide in your client’s favour. To borrow from the US legal philosopher Jerome Frank, laws are merely the formal clothes in which judges dress up their decisions.

So, to be a good barrister you need to be a good actor: to be able to put on a performance, to convince the judge that you believe that your client is in the right.

Of course, there are differences between the stage and the courtroom. As barristers we cannot make things up; we have to work with the facts that we are given. And unlike theatre, there is no script. A trial is an improv performance where the underlying material is constantly changing. It is a play where your fellow ‘cast members’ (the witnesses, the judge, your own client) can suddenly start wandering off in unexpected directions or making up their own lines. I have seen trials lost with a single bad answer in cross-examination.

It was a film adaptation of an Agatha Christie play that inspired me to become a barrister: Witness for the Prosecution, starring Charles Loughton and Marlene Dietrich. I remember being transfixed by the skill with which Loughton, as the defence QC, held centre-stage in court, moulding the jury to his will. I wanted to do the same. Little did I realise that it was Loughton who was actually being manipulated by Dietrich.

An excellent new production of the play in London has blurred the lines between theatre and law. It is set as though in a courtroom, and members of the audience get to sit in the jury box and decide the fate of the accused. It is very cleverly done.

In writing A Trial in Three Acts I have tried to achieve a similar blurring of the lines between theatre and courtroom: my homage to the Queen of Crime. And like Christie, I have provided readers will all the same clues as are available to Charles Konig KC – buried, of course, amongst a multitude of red herrings. The book contains a number of scenes from the play in which the murder takes place. Study these scenes carefully, and you may spot the solution.

I will provide one further clue. Charles Konig KC solves the crime not by identifying the murderer, but by working out how the murder was carried out. Readers can do the same.

Happy hunting. Break a leg.

A Trial in Three Acts by Guy Morpuss (Viper Books) Out Now

A trial is rather like a play. We wear our costumes. We perform to the audience. And on a good day no-one gets murdered. Six nights a week the cast of the smash-hit play Daughter of the Revolution performs to a sold-out audience. A thrilling story of forbidden marriage and a secret love child, the critics say it'll run for years. That is until one night the third act ends not in applause but in death, when leading lady Alexandra Dyce is beheaded live on stage. Every cast member has a motive, but it is the dead woman's co-star - and ex-husband - Hollywood legend Leo Lusk who is charged with the crime. When defence barrister Charles Konig is brought in last minute, he knows this ought to be the case of a lifetime. But Charles would rather be on his holiday trekking up K2, and he isn't interested in celebrities, especially ones that seem to be mysteriously trying to derail their own defence. But as he and his co-counsel New York lawyer Yara Ortiz sift through the evidence, it becomes clear that clues may lie in the play itself. And that Charles's only chance of victory is to identify the real murderer...

More information about the author and his books can be found on his website.  He can also be found on 'X' @guymorpuss.

Was Shakespeare a Spy? By Howard Linskey

The man at the heart of my Elizabethan murder mystery was a writer and an actor but was he also a spy?

William Shakespeare was a playwright, the world’s most famous in fact, and he was also an actor who appeared in his own plays and others. That is a matter of record. We also know that he was a businessman, a shareholder in a theatrical company and the Globe theatre and had investments in all manner of things, including land. He may even have been a money lender. But was he also a spy? 

The premise of my new novel, ‘A Serpent In The Garden’, is that Will Shakespeare is called upon to investigate the mystery of a woman’s suspicious death, in exchange for patronage. He is still a young man at this point and has only written one play, Henry the 6th. That was a small success, but now Will is struggling to write that difficult second play, and the Earl of Southampton is dangling the promise of financial support in exchange for more than just poetry. His cousin is the first reported victim of an outbreak of plague that hit London in 1592, claiming thousands of lives, but the Earl does not believe it, and asks Will to find out what really happened to Lady Celia. 

When the Queen’s spymaster, Robert Cecil, learns of this, he orders Will to spy on his new patron and report back to him. Will soon realises how dangerous it is to have two masters in Elizabethan England, especially when they are the most powerful men in the realm. 

The plot of my book does draw upon the truth, though I am not claiming Shakespeare was a Tudor James Bond. Back then, he might very well have been called upon to report on people to powerful men at court, since many others were given similar tasks, whether they liked it or not. Shakespeare’s most famous patron was the young, handsome and very rich, Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton. Will dedicated sonnets to him, including ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, using such flowery prose some have suggested they must have been lovers, though flattering dedications to a patron were fully expected, no matter how chaste the relationship. 

The Earl of Southampton had a very powerful enemy at Elizabeth’s court. Sir Robert Cecil took over the role of her principal advisor from his father, William and became spymaster for both Elizabeth and her successor, King James the 1st. He even uncovered the Gunpowder Plot. Back in Shakespeare’s time, he would have known that the Earl of Southampton, a lover of plays and poetry, was looking favourably on Will and might be about to give him patronage. Crucially, the Earl was also a Catholic in a Protestant land and suspected of conspiring against the Queen. Later, in 1601, he would join the Essex Rebellion against her, and be sentenced to life imprisonment, though he was eventually released by King James. Perhaps more importantly, the two men hated one another. Wriothesley was ward to Cecil’s father as a child, and they grew up together. Cecil was very short and had a curved back caused by scoliosis. He envied Southampton’s good looks, his vast fortune and, most galling of all, his ability to charm the Queen into becoming her favourite. Southampton also broke off his engagement to Cecil’s niece, humiliating her and, by extension, his family. 

This was a time when plots against Elizabeth the 1st abounded. As a protestant Queen in a religiously divided nation, she was always a target. Catholics still saw her as the illegitimate child of an illegal second marriage, between Henry the 8th and Anne Boleyn. If they needed any further encouragement, the Pope himself declared, in an official Papal Bull to his faithful, that removing and even killing the Queen of England was no crime, since he had already excommunicated her. He was granting Elizabeth’s English Catholic subjects official permission to commit a regicide, blessed by God himself. 

Cecil already had a network of spies everywhere, and he needed them to protect the Queen. Most notably, Christopher Marlowe is believed to have spied for him in the Lowlands, and he was a far more famous and successful playwright than Will Shakespeare at this point. It is usually accepted that Marlowe died in a ‘tavern brawl’ in 1593, but the building was not a tavern and the only other men there were his friends; Skeres, Frizer and Poley, all of whom had links to the criminal world and had worked for Robert Cecil. Poley even played a significant part in the downfall of Mary Queen of Scots, when he acted as a double agent during the Babington Plot of 1586. Significantly, Marlowe was about to be brought before the Privy Council, to be questioned about dangerous heretical writings that would have severely embarrassed Cecil, his former employer. How convenient that he was instead stabbed in the eye, by a supposed friend, just before he had the opportunity to discredit the Queen’s spymaster by association. 

There is another interesting historical slant to this story. When Will Shakespeare left Stratford as a young man, he had little or no money. By 1592, he was an actor who had just been paid the sum of two pounds for his first play. Within a little over a year, he had somehow acquired the enormous sum of fifty pounds. Enough to become a shareholder in a new theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. No one knows how he did this. Many believe the money came from his patron, the Earl, but that is a lot to pay to have sonnets dedicated to you, hence the suspicion that Will might have been Southampton’s lover. In my book, Will hopes to get the money by risking his life to uncover the enormous secret linked to the suspicious death of Lady Celia. 

Revealing anything more would be a spoiler and, like spies everywhere, I reserve the right to keep some secrets. But, if you would like to know what really happened to Celia, and how Will manages to narrowly avoid a gruesome death, at the hands of two of the most powerful men in the realm, you can find the answers between the pages of ‘A Serpent In The Garden’.

A Serpent in the Garden by Howard Linsey. (Canelo) Out Now

London, 1592. 28-year-old William Shakespeare is the rising man of English theatre. But plague has hit the capital, and the playhouses are to be shut. Livelihoods, and lives, are at stake. Lady Celia Vernon is one of the first to perish but did she really die of plague? Her cousin, the Earl of Southampton, orders Will to discover the truth in a London filled with conspirators, cutthroats and traitors. The Queen's spymaster, Robert Cecil, suspects the Earl of treason and orders Will to spy on him in return. Caught between two of the most powerful men in the kingdom, Will cannot possibly serve both masters, and could easily become the next victim of the killer he is trying to catch. With his future, safety and life on the line, Will uncovers a devastating secret, and changes the course of his, and the world’s destiny forever.

Tom Mead On Sweet Revenge: The Dark Origins of Cabaret Macabre

My first novel, Death and the Conjuror, and the bulk of its sequel, The Murder Wheel, were written in 2020 at the height of the UK’s COVID lockdowns. They were attempts to channel the joy—the sheer delight—that I find in Golen Age mysteries and use it to create something new. As such, both books are love letters to my favourite authors: John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Helen McCloy, Christianna Brand, Nicholas Blake, Edmund Crispin, and so many others. But as well as direct references to the work of the greats, the first two Joseph Spector novels are conscious attempts to emulate their style—to create something with the feel of a novel that might have been written in the glory days of the 1930s, when the puzzle mystery was at its peak. 

When the time came to get started on the third Spector novel, I felt more comfortable and (dare I say it) confident with my characters and the overall style of the books. As such, I was a little wary of resting on my laurels, recycling the same themes and ideas. But I wanted to retain the elements which (to my mind, at least) define the series, namely: magic, the theatre, the Gothic, the locked-room mystery. So, I started thinking about other influences which would blend neatly with that already-established formula. This brought me to the classic Japanese murder mystery—the honkaku—and its contemporary counterpart, shin-honkaku. These are genres with copious Golden Age connections, but also a heightened, pointedly non-naturalistic approach, high body counts, eccentric families, and brutal, bizarre murders. Tropes which are shared by an entirely different, yet curiously analogous, field: Jacobean tragedy.

As a lover of theatre (The Murder Wheel is set primarily in the backstage corridors of a fictional West End theatre, The Pomegranate), I wanted my characters to leave theatreland this time around, but to bring a semblance of the innately surreal realm of the stage with them to the fresh environs of the snowbound house in the English countryside. So, I looked to Jacobean drama. Agatha Christie made copious use of Shakespearean quotations for epigraphs and titles (Sad Cypress, Taken at the Flood), while Sleeping Murder features the John Webster tragedy The Duchess of Malfi as a prominent plot point—as does P.D. James’s The Skull Beneath the Skin. Meanwhile, Caroline Graham’s The Killings at Badger’s Drift (adapted for television as the very first episode of the long-running smash hit Midsomer Murders) borrows significant plot elements from John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore. There is therefore significant precedent for the overlap of such seemingly disparate genres. After all, both classic mysteries and these classic dramas rely on complex and remarkably convoluted plots, large casts of characters, and an all-important preoccupation with the macabre.

I have always been particularly fascinated by The Revenger’s Tragedy—even its origins are shrouded in mystery: it has been attributed to both Cyril Tourneur and Thomas Middleton. And the theme of revenge is incredibly potent and evocative. Of course, The Revenger’s Tragedy is decidedly not a mystery—though the characters deceive each other, they never deceive the audience. But what if, I wondered, the plot was reimagined and reinvented—transmogrified into a whodunit and, more importantly, a locked-room mystery? This gave me the shape of Cabaret Macabre.

Instead of Vindice the eponymous revenger, we have the troubled Victor Silvius. Instead of Castiza we have Caroline. And instead of the wicked duke, we have the judge, Sir Giles Drury. This was the inspiration I had been waiting for—I could practically see my cast of characters assembling in front of me.

And, perhaps inevitably, this one idea stimulated a slew of others. References to real-life criminous cases and characters--including the Brighton trunk murders of 1934 and the controversial celebrity pathologist Bernard Spilsbury--found their counterparts in the perverse yet fiercely logical murder plot. One strange, impossible death led to another, and my tapestry of puzzles began to coalesce into a single, cohesive piece. And the identity of the killer was a thrilling enigma.

The aim of any murder mystery is to give the reader a thrill; to whisk them away to another world. Whether Cabaret Macabre meets these criteria is not for me to say… but what I do know is that the book gave me plenty of thrills when I was writing it, and I can only hope it has a few more in store for the reader.

Cabaret Macabre by Tom Mead (Out Now) Head of Zeus

Bestselling author sleuth and illusionist Joseph Spector investigates his most complex case yet in this gripping new locked-room murder mystery, set in an English country house just before the Second World War. Hampshire, 1938. When prominent judge Sir Giles Drury starts receiving sinister letters, his wife suspects Victor Silvius, a man confined to a sanatorium after attacking Sir Giles. Meanwhile, Silvius’ sister Caroline is convinced her brother is about to be murdered... by none other than his old nemesis Sir Giles Drury. Caroline seeks the advice of Scotland Yard’s Inspector Flint, while the Drurys, eager to avoid a scandal, turn to Joseph Spector. Spector, renowned magician turned sleuth, has an uncanny knack for solving complicated crimes – but this case will test his powers of deduction to their limits. At a snowbound English country house, a body is found is impossible circumstances. Spector and Flint’s investigations collide as they find themselves trapped by the snowstorm where anyone could be the next victim – or the killer...

More information about Tom Mead can be found on his website. You can also find him on X @TomMeadAuthor, on Instagram @tommeadauthor and on Facebook.

             

Rebus: A Game Called Malice

 Six characters in search of a solution…

The world premiere of REBUS: A GAME CALLED MALICE is at Queen's Theatre Hornchurch 2nd - 25th February. Written exclusively for the stage by Ian Rankin and Simon Read

Directed by award winner Robin Lefevre with the lead role played by John Michie, best known for his roles as DI Robbie Ross in STV’s Taggart and Karl Munro in ITV’s Coronation Street. Michie will be joined by Rebecca Charles, Billy Hartman, Emily Joyce, Forbes Masson and Emma Noakes

A splendid dinner party concludes with a game created by the hostess. A murder in a stately home needs to be solved. Suspects, clues and red herrings await… but the dinner-party guests have secrets of their own, threatened by the very game they are playing. And among them is Inspector John Rebus. True crime is his calling – is he playing an alternative game, one to which only he knows the rules? There is danger with every twist and turn – and a shocking discovery will send this game called Malice hurtling towards a gasp-inducing conclusion...

Martina’s Dangerous Lady

It was thanks to Film Producer / Director Barry Ryan [Free@LastTV] and bestselling crime author Martina Cole of Two Queens Productions that I found myself at Stratford East’s Theatre Royal last week. I had been invited to view Patrick Pryor’s adaption of Martina Cole’s debut novel, the 1992 London Gangster saga that is ‘Dangerous Lady’. This was a risky venture for the playwright and the team he assembled at the East End’s renowned theatre in Stratford, now highlighted on the map as the epicenter of London 2012’s Olympic and Para-Olympic venue[s]. The other issue the Stratford team had to overcome is the knowledge that Dangerous Lady, was the novel that 20 years ago transformed single mother Martina Cole into one of the UK’s biggest selling crime writers. Cole is again riding high in the media’s zeitgeist with her 19^th novel THE LIFE in the bestsellers, as well as her various TV adaptations and real-life crime shows she fronts on Sky TV.

Martina was recently interviewed regarding the theatrical production of her debut novel -

The production of Dangerous Lady follows plot of Martina’s debut novel faithfully, but is [by necessity] a distillation of this dark cautionary tale. The theme is the allegiances and betrayal in a blue collar criminal family, set against the relationships between the corruption with the police and societies upper echelons. The process of paring down the narrative is done with the precision of surgeon’s scalpel as the play loses none of the novel’s grit, nor humor, an essential aspect of the narrative to keep this dark tale from tipping over the edge; because there is some real darkness below the surface of this tale of family moralities and the 1960’s London Underworld. It opens with the birth of Maura Ryan to Irish Matriarch Sarah Ryan. Maura, being Sarah’s only daughter to her sons Michael, Geoffrey and Anthony Ryan. When their father leaves Sarah and his brood penniless in post-war London; elder brother Michael Ryan takes it upon himself to provide for the family, but from the illegal black-market side of 1960’s London, building up a ruthless criminal network of vicious protection rackets, prostitution, strip-bars, drugs and petty [and not so] petty crime. 

Matriarch and firm Irish Catholic, Sarah Ryan tries to get the church involved in trying to put Michael and the brothers back into the law-abiding side of the street, only to find the local priest is a conduit for the IRA [and with an agenda that Michael Ryan can help with]. As wonderful as the cast are, some playing multiple roles, the real star of the show is the stage and production. We have extraordinary lighting, smoke, rear projections of the club-land’s neon strip-lighting, and the plate glass friezes of church-windows and evocative music that just makes the proceedings flow like wine down a thirsty gullet. The two-tier, moving-tracked stage is marvelous to watch as it allows the play to flow through the audience like deadly vignettes, that cut through the density of the narrative, distilling it to the core, without losing the richness and depth of the novel. The first act, closes on the pivotal scene that marks Maura Ryan’s future, and illustrates the moral corruption that religion can cast over people when used to forward an agenda. This scene is as graphic as I've seen in the theater  and though truly horrific to watch, such is the intensity in which it is offered to the audience who see the proceedings right in their faces. One can never state that it is a gratuitous scene, nor one that is titillating, far from it. This scene is as hypnotic as it is essential for the narrative - as this last scene, before the intermission is the key that turns in Maura Ryan’s lock transforming her from a sweet, naive young girl into something more akin to a hybrid of Tony Montana [‘Scarface’] and Larsson’s troubled protagonist - Lisabeth Salander.

The second act relays the journey that Maura and her family traverse as she takes on the mantle of the family crime business, standing side by side with her older brother Michael Ryan. Naturally the shadow this casts over younger brothers Geoffrey and Anthony will have deadly consequences for Maura as well as her beloved Michael, as well as her relationship with her mother, the increasingly unhinged Sarah Ryan.

I did wonder how a theatrical production would tackle the tense bullion robbery that Cole placed at the centre of her novel; but I needn’t have fretted, as I was totally blown away by the way they managed to keep the audience on the edge of their seats. Loud staccato gunfire, light flashes and sirens tore through the theatre as the bullion raid was recreated to nerve-shredding effect. I found myself ducking for cover several times to ensure I was not hit by stray gun-fire that seemed to strafe the audience.

Then as the play reaches its climax, we see the consequences that Maura and the Ryan family face from the law, as well as the IRA, all due to the choices they have made, many of which they had little control over. There is a dark morality woven into the play, the self-same theme that the novel of Dangerous Lady carries as a striated motif – violence and evil often create their own violence and evil, cancelling out the original deeds in a form of equalization. Though there is much darkness in the proceedings, I was delighted to see some of the best and wittiest ‘one-liners’ from Martina’s debut make it onto the stage in East London. It is the suffusion of gallows humour, mainly via extraordinary dialogue that balances out, and makes the scary and visceral aspects bearable. The whole play zips by as fast as the gunfire that echoes in the auditorium. In fact the two acts of Dangerous Lady, move so fast, that one scarcely feels the movement of time, though the team from Stratford’s Theatre Royal are well versed in the distillation of Cole’s thematic novels, having previously cut their teeth on previous works by this bestselling writer of “Two Women” and “The Graft”.

One aspect that is rarely mentioned about Martina Cole and her work, is how much compassion there is in her stories, something that is not lost in this theatrical adaptation; like her refusal to be judgmental about the myriad aspects that make up human nature. Though she rarely talks about it, I would like to point out that Cole supports many charities as well being a patron of the arts. It was over a decade ago that I discovered that she works with women in prison [especially the desperate mothers] from Africa and South America coerced into being ‘drug mules’ to support their families, now incarcerated in British Jails. Whenever I ask her about this, she always changes the subject and blushes. Personally I am amused and perplexed by the dichotomy in the response to Martina’s work, because she is second only to J K Rowling in terms of sales in the UK but receives very little literary acclaim for her work. Perhaps there is some snobbery at play here, so to see her work set against a theatrical back-drop is a form of vindication. When it comes to assessing the literary talent in the work of Martina Cole, her popularity is built upon by her own hard blue-collar work ethic, her skill as a storyteller and her generosity to those less privileged – with her ability to remain as grounded as she was when I first met her. She tells it like it is, a phrase that seems made for this gritty novelist who reveals the inner workings of the dark-side of the blue-collar world, a world that she understands and relays with an unflinching eye.

I was delighted to see her literary agent, the legendary Darley Anderson [who discovered Cole’s talent] as well as Jane Morpeth Managing Director of Headline Publishing in attendance, and together we all managed to have a drink with Martina, during the intermission. We raised our glasses and passed a toast to the versatile and prolific actor Herbert Lom who passed away recently, and reminisced at how a decade ago we managed to talk to him, and get a photo taken with him at one of the Crimescene London Film and Literature Festivals managed by Maxim Jakubowski and Adrian Wooten at The National Film Theatre. One thing I admire about Martina Cole is her unpretentious approach to crime writing, and how despite the fame and profile she has attained; she remains the same woman I met so many years ago. She also epitomizes an observation I have found in my many years of interviewing and reviewing the writers that make up the darkest edges of the genre. The darker the imagination, the more generous and amusing, as well as modest [and grounded] is the writer, in my experience.

Dangerous Lady runs until Saturday 17^th November, and we’d urge you to make time for a visit, because it is a spectacular production, and one that will make you ‘think’. If you’ve not read Martina Cole, then ‘The Life’ is a good place to start, as her work reveals what lurks beneath the veneer that we call ‘society’; one that we only glimpse when we walk away, often to the muffled echo of gunshots, or a scream from behind us. Cole writes about the world that many of us pretend does not exist, but one that lurks a few microns below our own reality.

For more information on tickets click here and to uncover more about the world of Martina Cole click here 

Photos (c) 2002 - 2012 Ali Karim of Stratford East Theatre Royal, Herbert Lom, Martina Cole, Darley Anderson and Jane Morpeth of Headline Publishing