A sleuth in search of clues to putting on a successful show at the Edinburgh fringe will not need to reach for a magnifying glass. There is already proof positive that 2023 is expected to be the year of “cosy crime”, when world-weary fringe punters will turn to the comfort and escapism of a whodunnit.
And, whether you fancy watching Drunk Women Solving Crime or Murder on the Disorient Express, there are mysteries aplenty to choose from. Among the 3,500 shows on the fringe, the range of improvisational detective comedies, musicals and parodies offers all the evidence needed that this genre is now seen as a safer bet.
“It is definitely a comfort thing for audiences,” said Francesca Moody, the acclaimed producer behind the original Fleabag show as well as this year’s Kathy and Stella Solve a Murder. “It is also comparatively easy to sell a mystery to an audience in these challenging times. Many writers and performers are naturally asking themselves, ‘What’s the thing the audience is most hungry for?’”
Moody puts the broad appeal, for both fringe-goers and performers, down to the fact that the structure of a whodunnit is so familiar, as are the cliches. “This means it lends itself very well to pastiche and comedy.”
“Murder” is now one of the key words that will help market a show. Take your pick from Murder Inc, Murder, She Didn’t Write and Murder on the Stage Floor, or try Locomotive for Murder, an improvised whodunnit at the Gilded Balloon’s Patter Hoose, which will work a bit like an episode of The BBC show Traitors. If not, then how about Come Die With Me: The Murder Mystery Musical Parody, on at the Just the Tonic venue?
Elsewhere, shows featuring Sherlock Holmes remain an Edinburgh staple – a festival tradition that is understandable in the light of Arthur Conan Doyle’s associations with the city. This fringe, among others, audiences can select from Sherlock Holmes: The Last Act, from Fringe Management, or Watson: The Final Problem, at Assembly in George Square.
For the Australian performer Tim Benzie, the current outbreak of theatrical crime in Edinburgh is a mixed blessing. He has been helping his audiences solve a crime in his show Solve-Along-A-Murder-She-Wrote since 2019 and he brings it to the festival this year alongside It’s a Mystery, another, newer, show specifically about people’s thirst for cosier kinds of murder.
“It’s entirely about why we love them. So it’s a good year to be doing it as it’s certainly a thing this summer,” said Benzie. “The bad news for me of course is that it means there’s lots of competition. Luckily my shows are selling well.”
Benzie, who moved from Brisbane to London in 2005, has analysed the facts: “Definitely it is having a surge of interest at the moment, something that historically has always followed troubling times. So it was popular during and after both world wars. And now we are also in a period of upheaval.”
The boom at the fringe mirrors the recent renaissance of the genre in publishing, in the wake of the bestselling impact of Richard Osman’s mystery titles, starting with The Thursday Murder Club. A quote from the late doyenne of the form, PD James, is relevant here, according to Benzie: “She once said something like, ‘No matter what your troubles, at least you are not the body on the library floor.’”
Moody suspects it might also be to do with the thirst for podcasts about true crime, although her own show is much less serious. “Our show is certainly not true crime,” she said. “It’s something accessible for everybody as it’s a story about friendship and a musical too. We’re all a bit risk-averse at the moment – although there is always risk involved in bringing up a show.”
But satire and hard politics are still a big competing attraction at the festival. Punditry and political interviews from the real world will be hoping to hold their own against the crimewave, with shows from comedian Matt Forde; the Conservative commentator Iain Dale; and journalist Steve Richards, who brings his Rock and Roll Politics show to the fringe again from 13 August. His show too, Richards said, was a kind of political whodunnit.
“There is still a yearning to make sense of the crazy period we are living through,” he said. “My show has a different theme each night and they’re like whodunnits, because I’m trying to find out why things have happened. None of it is by chance and, although these are difficult times, there is still an appetite at the fringe for trying to solve some of it.”
Two prime ministers and first minister Nicola Sturgeon had all disappeared since last year, and there were clues to follow up, suggested Richards, without even addressing the “deadly serious thriller going on in America now”.
But if audiences do shun hot political satire and comment to buy tickets instead for Huge Davies’s Whodunnit, or for CSI Crime Improvisation or for Mystery House at the Gilded Balloon, then Benzie has another theory at hand to explain their actions. “I’ve looked at the phenomenon as if I am a detective, starting with the scene of the crime. It is partly, I think, because we are living in a post-truth era and the one thing you do get in a detective mystery is some sort of clear solution. It’s uncontestable. And that can be really reassuring for people. After the trauma of Covid, people don’t want stories with outcomes that are too complex.”
• This article was amended on 6 August 2023 to correct the title of the Edinburgh show Murder, She Didn’t Write.
