“A silly game:” Playing ‘Murder in the Dark’ in Ada Moncrieff’s Murder at Maybridge Castle (2023)5/12/2023  Many detective stories use physical gameplay elements as a setup for the narrated murder mystery. One famous example is Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table which focuses heavily on the game Bridge. Other games equally lend themselves to mysteries: jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, chess, and even a variety of sports. One reader favourite is the ‘murder game,’ or ‘murder in the dark’: guests are invited to a dinner or a couple of days in a hotel during which a murder performance is acted out, giving them the chance to play at being investigators. It is an intellectual challenge for the guests with no other aim than having fun and harmless competition – until, of course, a real murder happens, and everybody is a suspect. One recent example of this setup is Ada Moncrieff’s latest Christmas mystery, Murder at Maybridge Castle. Charles, the new owner of the castle, has turned it into a hotel and markets it as haunted, appealing to spiritualists and sceptics alike. On a weekend in December, he invites a selection of guests to the Cumbrian countryside to celebrate the castle’s opening, with a programme consisting of a tarot card reading, a visit to the witch burial grounds near the castle, a séance – and a supposedly innocent game of murder in the dark which, however, soon turns serious when one of the guests meets an untimely end.
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 My new book, Crafting Crime Fiction (2023), is my first full length work of non-fiction. I wrote it straight after I wrote two three book crime fiction series in under six years (The Goodwin Crime Family series for Little, Brown in the UK, and the Hotel Inspector series for Kampa Verlag in German). I felt almost fiction-ed out. I needed a pause from the imaginary world. I also thought it was time to consider not just what writing and reading crime fiction meant to me, but how I approached the writing and teaching of it (as a longstanding creative writing professor). Maybe this could be of benefit to others.
 I was fortunate to be pointed toward this 1967 novel by Anne Billson, who wrote the introduction to this new edition. It’s a wonderful example of the flexibility of the crime genre. White employs familiar tropes to unfamiliar ends, brings in the mythic and the folkloric without attracting attention to the fact, even drawing on that hoary lynchpin of adolescent brutality, Lord of the Flies, without allowing the weight of it to drag down her own singular skillset.
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