The Morality of Murder

As I’ve mentioned before, customers occasionally make complaints about the suitability of our scripts for their purpose.  These have included protests about scripts for children in which the characters called each other names.  I take the view that plays offer some reflection on the real world where people are not always polite to one another; some customers take a different view, and that’s entirely fair.  For that reason, we make all of our play scripts available to be read in full on our web site before purchase.

Interactive Murder Mysteries are different. They are often played competitively, with the audience assembled in teams with a prize for the team which comes up with the best solution.  In those circumstances, putting the whole mystery – and therefore the solution – on the web site would be an open invitation to cheating.  Thus we don’t display the whole mystery on the web, but we do have “taster packs” for each one, giving a flavour of the structure and style.

We still get questions about the suitability of murder mysteries for particular groups.  I got one call from a guy who said (I think) that he was a Methodist minister.  His church group wanted to put on a murder mystery, but, because they were a church group, they didn’t want any of the characters to be involved in any immorality.  I think they were particularly concerned about sexual immorality, but I detected a certain logical inconsistency that he had not fully thought through.  I felt I had to point out that what he was asking for was a murder for which all the suspects had the purest of motives.

He hung up.