A Murder is Announced - By Agatha Christie

I am proud to announce that Season 1 of our 2010 program will be Agatha Christie’s murder mystery “A Murder is Announced”. This will be LPAE’s first foray into the murder mystery genre, and I am just dying to get this show on the road. The play is set in the perfectly ordinary English village of Chipping Cleghorn, where the villagers are agog with curiosity over an advertisement in the local gazette which reads: 'A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, at Little Paddocks at 6.30pm; Friends accept this, the only intimation." This comes as a great surprise to Letitia Blacklock, the owner of Little Paddocks, as she has no idea what the notice means. Miss Blacklock decides to take it in her stride and prepares herself to have guests on that evening. So, on the night the neighbors dropped by, just out of curiosity…….Then, as the clock chimes 6:30, the room goes dark. A gun explodes! A body falls! A woman screams! When the lights come on, a body is found lying on the floor in a pool of blood--dead. Who is the corpse? Who is the killer? And why had this murder been announced? Miss Marple, visiting an old friend in the village, can't resist joining the intrigue, and plays her role with the local constabulary to assist in solving this mystery. Named one of Agatha Christie's twelve "*essential books," A Murder is Announced was first published in 1950. The book was adapted for the stage by Leslie Darbon and opened in London at the Vaudeville Theatre in September of 1977