Librarian Recommended

Technically, we hosted a murder mystery program for adults at my library for the second time, but we had no idea what the heck we were doing the first time, so I am going to pretend that never happened.

Mind you, it went pretty well, but we cobbled it together in a couple of weeks, half the people who registered didn’t show, and we could have done lots better.

Therefore, for our second try at this type of program, we gave ourselves 3 months of rehearsals (which in hindsight was still not enough).

This time we used the wickedly fun Detective Club which is available for free on Ruth Ware’s website here. This program was for ages 18+ only and we were strict about this.

Detective Club is written as a murder mystery dinner where the guests play all the parts, and we knew this was not going to work for us so we decided to change it up just a little with staff playing the parts in the script (various mystery authors) while the patrons in attendance would become fans of the authors, who wan a chance at a meet and greet and then had to solve a murder.

At our first meeting, we drew lots to decide who would be the killer (Ruth Ware provides cards you can use for this) and then got to work. (I was the killer, by the way, which no one guessed!). Then we proceeded to turn one of our program rooms into our very low budget version of an English manor house, and created clues, red herrings and fun decor which we made ourselves or brought in from home.

We made sure to put clues into the room to cast suspicion on each character including:

• A birth certificate hidden in a hollow book implying one character was the deceased’s illegitimate child.
• A short, unfinished note implying the victim was about to fire one of the characters.
• A false book cover implying the victim knew one character had murdered her husband.

We had posters of various types such as might be owned by a mystery author, including some that gave clues to errors made by the killer, and let everyone take notes, and work together.

In the end, we fooled them, because they picked the wrong killer, which the patrons actually loved.

The read killer in our scenario was the true-crime author, whom the patrons had to figure out was not actually a real Doctor, using both their speeches which gave inaccurate medical and anatomical facts, and some of the posters which provided the correct medical/anatomical info.

Our only real stumbling blocks were that because all the staff involved works different shifts it was hard to get together to do full run-throughs of the entire program, and the fact that patrons in our community are notoriously late for EVERYTHING.

All our advertisement very clearly stated we would lock doors at a specific time, no one could come in late, and those wanting to participate would need to be at the library EARLY. Of course, the next day we got an angry email from someone claiming they got got “one minute late” and could not get in. (Lies. We gave a 5 minute grace period).

Those who DID arrive on time had a blast. We served “champagne” (non-alcoholic apple cider) and had so much great feedback that we are already working on next year’s mystery scenario. This time though, we plan to give ourselves SIX months of prep time.

I think some of our staff who doesn’t normally program have caught the acting bug!