Dying for the weekend; Dial M for murder to book yourself in for a

Sunday Herald, The, Feb 17, 2002 by Words Stephen Phelan

Dinner passed pleasantly and without incident, a party of around 50 guests enjoying three courses of well-prepared traditional fare within the warm and comfortable confines of The Oak Room. It should be noted, however, that this relative calm - save for the murmur of conversation between old friends and new acquaintances across the long tables - was in itself the source of a certain inquietude. We had, after all, assembled at the Winnock Hotel, on the darkling winter banks of Loch Lomond, for an evening of "murder-mystery entertainment". And the prolonged anticipation of some ghastly epiphany of gruesome and ingenious villainy was creating an air of flighty, excitable, even bloodthirsty impatience. We were waiting for something to happen. We were waiting, in the words of sage old film director Robert Altman, for "an Agatha Christie kind of thing"...

That was Altman's casual description of his latest movie Gosford Park, which, if we may leave our scene for a few moments, is the most recent celebration of the 'classic British murder tradition' popularised by Christie. Which is to say, murder for pleasure. The film, like murder-mystery novels and these wine-and-dine thrill-kill weekends, is a sly and rigorously plotted amusement, shaped from all the elements that define the format - a remote, enclosed, decadent setting (a home county mansion house in 1932), a stately, sinister atmosphere, a simple but perplexing killing, and an investigation among a cast of aristocratic caricatures with their own secrets and agendas.

It's Altman's first decent movie in many years, a precision engine of entertainment, discreetly underplayed by a crafty cast of actors, full of appealingly mean and venal suspects, delightfully malicious remarks, and smart observations on the confused and unravelling class system of the period. It's even got a bit more soul than Agatha Christie's works, which were usually organised as cleverly and methodically as crossword puzzles. Where her corpses were often depersonalised objects in the game, Gosford Park's murder ultimately expands on the observation sometimes made by Christie's egghead Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, "How magnificently the English hide their emotions."

There hasn't been a whodunnit like this for a long time, and perhaps its grateful recent reception by the public is a measure of how much we miss and enjoy this elegant sort of escapism. Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist in history, and she still sells 100,000 books a week even 26 years after her death, but her tidy style and effete milieu haven't been culturally fashionable for a while. Even in her heyday, hard-boiled crime-writer kings like Raymond Chandler pooh-poohed her elaborate plots and gentle detectives, arguing that real murder happened in the gutter, not the drawing room, born of urban brutality and moral chaos rather than the whims of posh puppets.

These days, fictional killing, even in the most idiotic books and movies, is obliged to provide some visceral and plausible sense of context, consequence and psychology. Which actually makes for far less good clean fun than the world of the old-fashioned murder- mystery, where rich, reckless wives infuriate their boorish military husbands by conducting innumerable wild affairs with racing motorists and Italian counts, only to die horribly when stropanthin poison is slipped into their pink gin. Where bodies are discovered with exclamations such as "So it wasn't a champagne cork! It was a pistol shot we heard!". And where the murderer politely confesses when their scheme is exposed, blurting that "Gervaise Chevenix-Gore was a bully and a windbag! I couldn't let him ruin Victoria's happiness!"

This stuff may not be enriching art - even Christie's literary ancestor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wearily dismissed the genre as "an elementary form of fiction". But the paperback masses have always loved the idea of a high-society twilight of operatic crime, as Doyle discovered when he killed off his own master detective Sherlock Holmes and was forced to resurrect him in the face of hissing public outrage.

When Anthony Pratt, a solicitor's clerk and murder-mystery fanatic, developed a home game called Cluedo to pass the time while sheltering from air raids over Leeds in World War II, it became a ferociously popular way for the whole family to play a part in one of these macabre investigations, eyeing each other suspiciously and spitting unfounded accusations across the board ("It was you, damn it! Colonel Mustard! With the lead pipe! I just know it!"). Well heeled amateur sleuths were soon playing live games of Cluedo in high- class establishments like New York's Waldorf Astoria, and today the fantasy murder-mystery experience is available to couples, corporate parties and hen nights at hotels and guest houses around the UK.

Companies of specialised actors offer customised events ranging from the classic role-playing weekend to brilliant concept packages like Starstruck Murder Karaoke and the Grease Reunion Party Night (Danny, Sandy, Rizzo and the gang get together again, but their dingadong singalong is interrupted by bloody murder!) ...