At one point years ago, my wife Mary and I decided to have a murder mystery party at our house. I looked at all the ones that were commercially available, and they all seem to end with plausible reasons for any of the participants to be the murderer. That’s boring to me.
So, we wrote our own. Five of our friends were invited to be ‘suspects,’ and we had clues scattered around the house (a newspaper article said one of the guys had just been picked up on embezzlement charges, for example,) and we had certain scenes planned for specific times. They were in various parts of the house, from the living room to the bedroom, to the kitchen and the garden. One of the subplots was that Mary was having an affair with our interior decorator. Whether a guest was able to see these scenes depended, of course, on whether they happened to be in the right place at the right time. At the agreed on moment, I was poisoned in the living room, Mary was found dead in the guest bedroom of a gunshot wound.
A naive young lady got to me when I was out in the garden and told me very seriously, “Adam, I think Mary’s having an affair!” She was quite serious about it, and she still didn’t quite believe it was a hoax until we all gathered afterward, took the vote, explained the various subplots and determined the winner.
How shocked she would have been to find out that just a few years later Mary became a hotwife!
Oh, and another thing - - just to top it off, of course the interior decorator was gay. He even propositioned me once!