Show Business is Murder

Introduction by STUART M. KAMINSKY

“THE PLAY’S THE thing wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the king.”

Hamlet was playing detective and using show business, a troupe of traveling players, in an attempt to get the killer to give himself away. Hamlet, being Hamlet, can’t resist the urge to step in and tell the actors how to do their job.

Shakespeare was not the first to use a show business/mystery tie-in. Hamlet wasn’t the first would-be show business detective.

But he may have been the first truly famous one created by a major author. Excuse me, the major author in the English language, if we ignore George Bernard Shaw’s somewhat disingenuous dismissal of the bard.

But I digress.

The icons of mystery fiction have always been drawn to show business. An actress took in Sherlock. Poirot was constantly running into theater people. Dorothy Sayers wrote a novel about murder in a publishing house.

It’s hard to think of a mystery novelist who wrote more than five books who wasn’t drawn to show business.

And then came Hollywood.

Show business mysteries went far beyond and deeply into Hollywood. In his novel The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler set the tone of fascination with, and repulsion by, Hollywood. Ross MacDonald… I could go on with a list that would include almost every major mystery writer of the last century, but let’s focus, at least for a paragraph or two, on one quirky byway of the show business mystery.

A popular, and generally forgotten, young readers’ genre in the 1930s and 1940s featured the movie star as detective. I read books with detectives like Bonita Granville and Shirley Temple. I think Jackie Cooper even solved a murder or two.

Andrew Bergman picked up the idea of using real show business figures in mysteries with his LeVine novels, and I, George Bagby, and others kept the books coming. The public that loved mystery movies also seemed to love mystery novels about movies and stars.

This is not to say that other sides of show business were being neglected by the fleet fingers of those of us who like to kill performers and artists on our pages.

Let’s jump to this collection of stories. If it has a design, besides the obvious one of show business as focus, it is variety-variety in style, subject matter, media, and seriousness. Some of the stories, like John Lutz’s tale of a talking dog and mine about an inept vaudevillian, are meant to be funny. Some, like Annette Meyers’s tale of a failed show business marriage, are clearly tragic.

Just for fun, we’ve included a script by Gary Phillips and Ed Hoch’s near-fantasy about a performance artist whose act consists of her being a roulette ball.

And media? We have stories about television, movies, theater, the music industry, and even a woman who hires a private detective to find Elvis. We have actors, producers, writers, and musicians who solve the crimes or become the victims.

We have stories set in England, Germany, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and an imaginary small town.

We have traditional first-person private-eye novels and third-person not-so-traditional tales from the perspective of killers and victims.

Our tales take place in time over the past 70 years.

If anything else holds this collection of whimsy together, it is that show business is possibly at its most interesting when it is, indeed, murder.

– Stuart M. Kaminsky