Murder Mysteries a Play for Voices (9781466109827)

by Neil Gaiman

Smashwords Edition

Biting Dog Publications

Duluth, Georgia

2011

— | — | —

Murder Mysteries copyright by Neil Gaiman

Artwork copyright by George Walker

This digital edition copyright 2011 by Biting
Dog Press

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contact

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[email protected]

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FOREWORD

Years ago, when I was 7 and 8 and 9, my
family piled into the station wagon for weekend-long road trips,
and as we rolled down one interstate after another, we listened to
cassettes of old-time radio shows, like
The Shadow
,
Suspense
,
Fibber McGee
and
Molly
, and
Abbot and Costello
. I knew then, riding in the dark, huddled
in the backseat, alone, connected, adrift in the worlds’ of
children’s imaginations from 30 and 40 years before, that this was
what I wanted to do with my life. Being a child of the 1970’s, I’d
grown up on television, video games, and Star Wars, but nothing had
so captured my imagination as these old shows, crackling through
the void, through time. I wanted to write, direct, produce and star
in old-time radio shows.

“But son” my father dutifully explained,
“they don’t do radio drama anymore, they haven’t done it since
before I was a kid.”

One of the thrills of my life has been to
prove him wrong. In 1996, I was fortunate enough to land at
SCIFI.COM, where I founded Seeing Ear Theatre (
www.scifi.com/set
)

My goal has been to provide a home for
new-time expressions of audio drama. To use new plays, new stories
to turn on a whole new audience to this art form.

But why audio drama? Why not just do stage
plays, or TV programs, or better yet, films…? The power of the
audio drama is unique among electronic forms of story-telling. It’s
power is felt on a deeply personal level – the act of listening is
more similar to the act of reading than it is to watching. When you
curl up with a good book, you give birth to the world and the
characters that inhabit that world. They belong to you. When you
read, you are engaged in a creative process, but when you go to see
a film, or watch TV, you sit passively, digesting some else’s
vision, someone else’s world… Imagine for a moment teaching this
classroom exercise: Ask the students to listen to a bit of
The
Shadow
, and then ask them to do a drawing of the lead
character. You will get 25 different pictures, all of them right,
all of them individual creations. Now play a clip from one of their
favorite TV shows,
The Simpsons
for example, and ask them to
draw a picture of Bart Simpson, and you will get 20 different
representations of what’s already there on the screen, some of them
better than others, better copies of what they see. One exercise is
a creative act, the other is not. The imagination is like a muscle;
if we fail to inspire it to exercise, it will atrophy, become limp,
and useless.

In 1998 I picked up a copy of Neil Gaiman’s
short story collection
Smoke And Mirrors
, and was instantly
drawn to “
Murder Mysteries
.” As I read I could hear the play
unfolding in its myriad layers. I could imagine the rich sonic
possibilities of creating the sounds of the City of Angels. What
does the Hall of Being feel like, and what of the squadron of
Lucifer’s angels practicing their war games – what do they sound
like? But even more than the sound possibilities, I was drawn,
hooked by Neil’s use of two narrators to tell the story. From the
beginning of the medium, radio drama has relied (sometimes too
frequently) on the role of the narrator, the truthsayer guiding us
through the story, holding our hands. But not here, not in
Murder Mysteries
. Neil plays with our sense of trust, our
sense of complacency… He yanks us back and forth between two
tellers, never letting us get too comfortable with either one.

We recorded the voices
Murder
Mysteries
in one long day in the summer of 1998, then I went
home and crashed, wondering if we’d got it all, hoping that we’d
done justice to the play… Brian Dennehy, who plays Raguel, the
Angel of Vengeance, was deep into his Tony-Award winning turn as
Willie Loman in
Death of a Salesman
. I can only imagine how
exhausted he was after that particular evening’s performance. I
then spent two weeks at John Colucci, my sound designer’s house,
living, eating, drinking, sleeping, and dreaming this wicked,
delirious tale.

As you read through the script for the first
time, ask yourself how you’d make the worlds sound, what type of
music you’d use, what type of actors you’d cast, and then log on to
our website and give a listen to our production. I’ll bet it’s
nothing like the one in your head – but then, that’s the power of
the imagination, isn’t it?

Brian Smith

January, 2001

Narrator ~ tells story

Carasel ~ angel who is murdered

Tinkerbell Richmond (Tink) ~ Narrators
girlfriend

Friend ~ Tink’s friend Dorothy

Raquel (Then & Now) ~ angel of
vengeance

Phanuel – senior designer

Angel #1 ~ works under Phanuel

Angel #2 ~ works under Phanuel

Lucifer ~ captain of the host

Saraquael ~ Carasel’s partner

Zephkiel ~ angel without wings

Passenger ~ on plane with Narrator

Flight Attendant ~ on plane with Narrator

SILENCE. JUST THE WIND, AND A TINKLING,
CRYSTALLINE MUSIC, LIKE WIND-CHIMES. WE’RE VERY HIGH UP...

CARASEL

This is madness. You don’t understand...
please, just...

(whispering)

No. For the love of God, no.

(loudly)

No!

(cut off as he is stabbed)

THERE’S A LOUD THUD, AND THEN THE SOUND OF
BEATING WINGS, AND A SCREAMING AS THE ANGEL FALLS, DYING, FALLING,
WAILING. THEN A DULL SPLAT AS IT HITS THE SIDEWALK, AND THEN JUST
SILENCE: ONLY THE WIND.

INTO THE SILENCE, THE OPENING CREDITS ARE
READ. AT THE END OF THE CREDITS...

NARRATOR

This is all true.

(beat)

Ten years ago, give or take a year, I found
myself on an enforced stopover in Los Angeles, a long way from
home. It was December, and the California weather was warm and
pleasant. England, however, was in the grip of fogs and snow
storms, and no planes were landing there. Each day I'd phone the
airport, and each day I'd be told to wait another day. This had
gone on for almost a week.

(pause. remembering, explaining)

I was barely out of my teens. Looking around
today at the parts of my life left over from those days, I feel
uncomfortable, as if I've received a gift, unasked, from another
person: a house, a wife, children, a vocation. Nothing to do with
me, I could say, innocently. If it's true that every seven years
each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly
inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times
have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.

(beat: he just said more than he meant
to)

I was in Los Angeles. Yes.

On the sixth day I received a message from
an old sort-of-girlfriend from Seattle: she was in LA too, and she
had heard I was around on the friends-of-friends network. Would I
come over?

/SFX/ A PHONE RINGING, THEN AN ANSWERING
MACHINE CUTS IN:

TINK

(on machine)

Hi. This is Tink. You know what to do and
you know just how to do it.

/SFX/ THE BEEP.

NARRATOR -- LIVE

Hi. Tink? It’s me. I’d love to see you.
Yes.

NARRATOR

I left a message on her machine. Sure.

That evening: a small, blonde woman
approached me, as I came out of the place I was staying. It was
already dark. She stared at me, as if she were trying to match me
to a description, and then, hesitantly, she said,

FRIEND

Are you Tink's friend? The guy she met in
England?

NARRATOR -- LIVE

That’d be me, yes.

FRIEND

I’m her room-mate. Car's out back. C'mon:
she's really looking forward to seeing you.

/SFX/CROSS-FADE SOUNDS OF LA WITH...

/SFX/ INTERIOR. MOVING CAR (OLD OLDSMOBILE
UNDER)

NARRATOR

Her car was one of the huge old boat-like
jobs you only ever seem to see in California. It smelled of cracked
and flaking leather upholstery. We drove out from wherever we were
to wherever we were going.

FRIEND

So how did you meet Tink?

NARRATOR -- LIVE

Bit of a cliche. We met in a pub,
actually.

FRIEND

Yeah. I knew that already. She told me. I
said, you’re crazy, you don’t know anything about him, she said,
Dorothy, he’s English. I said, no offence hon, Jack the Ripper was
English.