Status Updates From Lay On, Mac Duff!

Anyone for a game of Clue?
Several weapons gone missing, lots of rooms, anyone could be the murderer, and the air is thick with disquieting hatred.

I have lived all of Charlotte Armstrong’s melodramatic thrillers. I’m not sure her thriller mystery here is quite as gripping.
We shall see. The end is near.

Investigative reveal before one has solved the mystery and performing it in front of and with the potential suspects? Never read a mystery where the build up was so uniquely and purposefully patched together.

And here’s where one of the characters tries to quote that famous Shakespearean line at Mac Duff, and of course he flubs the line and the great detective has to correct him.
Tension compounding moment by moment.
Charlotte Armstrong is very good at creating tension in a crowd.

Left “…listening to the problem.”
Now there’s a Mac Duff image that resembles a Poirot image.

Not sure this is as much a Mac Duff mystery as a Bessie-becomes-NancyDrew mystery. Bessie is definitely modeled after young Judy Garland.

Macdougal Duff. Wish my American History teachers had been that strange and gone on to be amateur detectives.

The Mac Duff has arrived on the scene!

Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.
Yep, I can see them in the roles of Bessie and JJ clear as a bell.
A very visual trick played by Charlotte Armstrong.

Uproariously laughing!
I love John Joseph Jones!
A more believable newspaper reporter than those we have today.
And the lighthearted flirting with our heroine, Bessie, is charming and witty.
She is a church mouse in the big city after all.

Charlotte Armstrong’s strength is in how she allows the characters to reveal what happened. Then there’s a story teller/listener/learner who collects all the vital information. The detective hasn’t even joined the party yet. He’ll be along shortly.

I started reading Charlotte’s books when I found out Mischief was the origin of my favorite Marilyn Monroe movie, “Don’t Bother to Knock”, and loved it. All of Charlotte’s books can be labeled noir mysteries. You know, when the young church mouse Bessie arrives in NYC to live with her wealthy uncle and is handed a cocktail. You know someone in that room is going to die.