What is a murder mystery event?
The idea of live action murder mystery entertainment goes back as far as the 1950s, the heyday of Agatha Christie and many other mystery writers, but these were run as one-off occasions by individuals for friends and family. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that companies in America started running regular murder mystery evenings and weekends; very soon they came to the UK and by the mid-1980s the murder mystery weekend had become regarded as a very British form of entertainment. The general idea of a murder mystery event, whether an evening or a weekend, is that the audience are invited to interact to varying degrees with actors. These actors play the characters in a plot which involves the murder of one or more of the characters. From interacting with the actors and/or putting clues together, the audience must solve the mystery, usually over the course of a meal or two. Whilst all murder mysteries share this basic set-up, there are many different ways it can be performed.
