It is 1940 and Mrs Mudge, the cleaning lady is busy tidying the Little Theatre in Lulverton, which is run by the local amateur dramatics' society. But she is in for a surprise when she finds a corpse in the ticket office, stabbed with a dagger – a prop from the society's latest play, Measure for Measure.
The novel is in two sections. In the first, the narrator, Vaughn Tudor, describes the formation of the small amateur theatre group, in a sleepy village on the South Coast in the period leading up to the Second World War. But then in the second half, after the revelation of the identity of the victim and the calling in of Witting's series detective Inspector Charlton to investigate, the reader finds out that there were rather a lot of people who had cause to visit that little theatre on the night of the murder....
But can the police disentangle the complicated relationships to discover the real killer?
It seems that this story had its roots in a real live production of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (1604), which Witting saw in May 1939. at the Bromley Little Theatre in Kent. First published in 1941, it was the fifth of Witting's novels which were written over a period of 30 years and excels both in the plot but also, and notably in his extraordinary characterisation skills. The author died in 1968 having completed 12 books.
This is the third of Galileo's reissues of Witting's oeuvre. The first, published October 2021, Catt out of the Bag, was received with great enthusiasm by Golden Age crime fiction fans and is already in its third printing (as of March 2021). The second, Murder in Blue will also be published during Autumn 2021.