It starred Fritz Weaver, Tammy Grimes, Thomas Toner, William Preston, Mordecai Lawner, Stephen Newman, Richard Clarke and Walter Atamaniuk and was directed by Edwin Sherin.
Passing through the club, Simon Vale—a younger member who writes best-selling thrillers steeped in sex and gore—belittles the elder trio for their persistence in portraying murder as stylish, ingeniously contrived puzzles, rather than the brutal, bloody, frequently irrational thing it is in real life.
Needless to say, they ultimately learn that arranging for someone to be found shot, stabbed and hanged in a room locked and barricaded from the inside (wearing a gorilla costume, no less) is somewhat more difficult to accomplish in real life than on the printed page.
With the aid of, among other diverse items, a bayonetted rifle, a Xanax-laced bottle of ketchup, a mace-wielding suit of armor, an ill-fitting red dress, a recalcitrant thumbtack, a convenient gust of wind, and an unsuspected fly in the ointment—the classic British detective story and our protagonists' reputations are ultimately rescued from a premature demise.
The conflict between the "cozy" and "hard-boiled" genres of crime writing, heavily emphasized in the play, is non-existent in the novel, as is the characters’ intention of being caught and made to pay the penalty for what they’ve done.
[7] A review of a repertory production at the Asolo Theatre Company, Sarasota, Florida in 1997 declared: In program notes for the same staging, the late, renowned detective author Stuart M. Kaminsky wrote: