Don’t judge Murder by the Book by its first impressions

The murder makes it better. For the first 15 minutes or so, Murder by the Book, an Anglophiliac mystery-comedy that’s better with corpses than it is with laughs, seems like it might be the victim that deserves a Clue-style inquest: Are the culprits the director, Paul Hough, and the miscast actors? Or authors Duncan Greenwood and Robert King, whose literary, wordy, nearly unmemorizable dialogue carves up actor Scott Cordes, a gifted pro? Or perhaps the American Heartland Theatre audience, who responded, even to the good jokes, with a silence more stony than the contents of The Thing’s underpants?

Whatever, the early scenes tank. This is especially true during a comic duel between Cordes, as mystery writer Selwin Piper, and Cheryl Weaver, as the wife who wants to divorce him. Normally I’d be happy to see these two performers pitted against each other. But Cordes, who is so adept at playing galoots, is a slick SOB here, an author of means and bearing. His ripostes — “No vitriolic epigram” or “You look positively autumnal” — don’t come easily for an actor better suited to spitting words from his gob. He’s growling when his tongue should be dancing. Often, the words all cram together in a jumbled gush. Weaver seems off at first, too, and together they’re rhythmless. Their big comic number is DOA.

The talk is overwritten and garbled, but I’ll give it this: It’s interesting. Imogen Piper, the wife, has shown up to murder Selwin, and Selwin, a fastidious plotter in his fiction, upbraids her about the sloppiness with which she’s going about it. Soon he starts making suggestions. They’re clever, vain and flirtatious, and they should be hilarious. Instead, they’re just harbingers of the better fun to come, once the bodies start piling up.

The opening spat isn’t the delicious poison it should be, but it’s possible to warm up to Murder by the Book‘s sharp plotting, especially when sound designer Roger Stoddard’s ripping gunshots save us — and not a moment too soon! Finally, guns in a theater that don’t sound like wine corks popped underwater!

We get a corpse, and we get a killer. Then, in a silent scene reminiscent of Anthony Perkins cleaning up the shower in Psycho, we realize how quickly our sympathies can switch from victim to murderer. Moments later, we get the detective character, a neighborhood doofus named Peter Fletcher (Peter Weber), and our sympathies shift again. We know what should have been a perfect crime will not go unpunished.

Or will it? And was it? And is the neighbor really a doofus? And why does Selwin’s publisher, John Douglas (James Wright, at his dim-bulb best), come popping in just moments later? I tease with questions rather than describe incidents because revealing more would spoil the show’s chief pleasure. In scene after scene set entirely in Selwin’s apartment, Greenwood and King offer numerous surprises. Hough stages them well, and the cast grows more confident as the evening wears on. Better still, the twists satisfy, especially if you’ve been picking up the clues. The betrayals and reversals are implausible, of course, but they’re arrived at honestly and are in the spirit of the genre; by the end, they fuel scenes of effective tension.

Unfortunately, it’s also the spirit of the genre to assign, late in the narrative, entirely new sets of motivations to the characters’ earlier actions. While I can’t get behind some of Cordes’ delivery, I admire the way his Selwin seems up to two things at once. Weaver also gives layers to her plot-servicing character. In the second act, in her second lengthy scene paired up with a man (whom I can’t mention this time), much of what was off in the opening is now on.

Peter Weber and Jennie Greenberry (as Selwin’s typist) are strong in individual moments, but in light of later revelations, I’m not sure those individual moments make much sense. Still, they pair up early, and they are so successful in bringing out each other’s charms, there’s hardly time to wonder why they’re taking the murder, which they stumbled onto, as such a lark. (Or why they don’t call the cops. Or why they take to each other so quickly.)

It’s to the authors’ credit that all of these questions are answered. It’s to Cordes’ and Weaver’s credit that the show rights itself after that opening. It’s to everyone’s credit, including Hough’s, that the daft spookhouse gotcha at the end of the first act got even the unmoved crowd I sat with to buzz impatiently all through intermission. Though not laughing, plenty of audience sleuths were trying to work out the puzzle.

If that’s your game, it’s worth a ticket.

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