Here’s the annoying thing …
Despite everything I’ve just written, it’s obvious that there’s going to be another murder because if there hadn’t been, why would I have written anything at all? The very fact that you’re holding this book, complete with compulsory bloodstain on the cover, rather spoils the surprise. It proves how handicapped writers are when they’re dealing with the truth, with what actually happened.
There was one thing that I didn’t know, however. Although the first three books had caused me enough upsets, this one was going to be much, much worse.
2
Mindgame
I love theatre. When I look back at my life, I can remember – vividly – evenings when I have felt myself to be in a state of complete happiness; when performance, music, costume, direction and, of course, writing have combined to make an experience that I know will stay with me for ever. The National Theatre’s 1982 production of Guys and Dolls. Nicholas Nickleby at the RSC. Michael Frayn’s brilliantly constructed comedy, Noises Off. Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco swapping parts every night in John Barton’s Richard II. I went to that when I was eighteen years old and I can still see them holding the ‘hollow crown’ between them, gazing into the mirror that it has become. Theatre, at its best, is a candle that never goes out and all of these productions, along with many more, still burn in my memory.
In my early twenties I worked as an usher at the National and saw Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce perhaps a dozen times each and I was never bored. Earlier in the evening, I would sit down in the backstage canteen wearing my grey nylon shirt and slightly camp mauve cravat and I might find myself a few places away from the likes of John Gielgud or Ralph Richardson, both of them imperious even in their tracksuits and trainers. Of course, I never spoke to them. They were gods to me. Donald Sutherland once tipped me twenty pence when I was working in the NT cloakroom. I still have it somewhere.
Before I started writing novels, I wanted to work in the theatre. I acted in plays at school. I directed them at university. I went to shows three or four nights a week, often standing at the back of the stalls, which would cost as little as two pounds. I tried to get into drama school and I applied for jobs as an assistant stage manager, which in those days was a recognised way into the profession. It never worked. I began to see there was something about me that not only didn’t fit in with the world I so wanted to enter, it somehow barred me from it. ‘Ambition, madam, is a great man’s madness,’ says Antonio in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, a play I first saw at the RSC in 1971 with Judi Dench in the title role. But it’s accepting that you will never achieve your ambition that can really drive you mad.
Perhaps that was part of the reason why I wrote Mindgame. I was keeping the flame alive.
Mindgame was actually inspired by another play I’d seen in my teens and which had obsessed me ever since. Sleuth by Anthony Shaffer （brother of Peter） was both a parody of Agatha Christie and a completely original murder mystery, as inventive as anything she had ever created. There were only three characters – a wealthy writer, his wife’s lover and a lugubrious detective called Inspector Doppler – but in the space of two acts the play managed to pull off a series of extraordinary surprises, doing things on the stage that had never been done before and leaving the audience gasping. It was a huge hit. It ran for over two thousand performances. It won major awards. It was filmed … twice. To this day, it remains a theatrical landmark.
It goes without saying that there have been attempts to replicate the success of Sleuth, but apart from Ira Levin （Deathtrap）， nobody has come close. When you think about it, there’s not a great deal you can do on the stage. Magic and illusion may have a part to play, but so much of theatre is words: people moving about a space, talking to each other. Shaffer broke the physical rules – just as his brother did with Black Comedy, a farce that takes place during a power cut, the stage lights coming on only when the blackout supposedly begins. The trouble is, once the rules have been broken, nobody will be excited when someone else does it a second time. If something is unique, it can’t be done twice.
Even so, it had become an obsession of mine to do exactly that: to write a play with a small cast and a series of twists and turns in the manner of a traditional murder mystery, but using the stage in an entirely new and surprising way. Whenever I found myself between books or TV scripts, I would scribble down ideas and over the years I had completed three plays before I came up with the idea for Mindgame. I had, incidentally, had limited success. One of my works, a one-act play called A Handbag, was performed as part of a local festival. The other two were never produced.