THE PLAYWRIGHT.

Richard Harris is the author of several plays in a variety of genres, though he is known primarily as a dramatic craftsman in the tradition of Agatha Christie and Anthony Shaffer, masters of the British psychological thriller.  More on Richard Harris.

THE SETTING.

The Business of Murder takes place on a single day in contemporary London.  Act I occurs on an "autumn afternoon at about 3:30 p.m.," Act II, five hours later, at 8 p.m.  By 3:30 on an autumn day twilight is clearly approaching this far north; and by 8:00, of course, night has fallen.  This means that the atmosphere of the play--the light we see coming through the windows--is predominantly dark, perhaps somewhat gloomy.  This reflects important emotional qualities in the plot.

Both acts are set in a "first-floor flat in a converted house in the inner London suburbs"--which is to say neither in the heart of the city nor fully outside the metropolitan orbit, neither here nor there.  "There is nothing grand about the place," the playwright tells us, "neither is it seedy.  All in all, it is typical of the sort of part-furnished accommodation rented by professional couples who are respectable but not wealthy."  Consisting of a sitting-room, a bedroom, and an offstage kitchen, the setting is small, perhaps a bit claustrophobic, and, as we have seen, rather nondescript both in its location and in its architecture.

These qualities are important to the action.  The cramped quarters thrust the characters together physically, thus intensifying their conflicts and animosities.  And the banality of the setting reflects central aspects of one of the main characters.

THEMES.

In the second act, Stone defines the involvement of all three characters in "the business of murder:"

[I]t's something we're all very much concerned with--each in our own way. . . . That is--"business" in the sense of 'habitual occupation, profession, trade'--applying to you--(he indicates them both)--and "business" in the sense of "the thing that concerns one . . ."--applying to me.

Being involved in the "business of murder" has unfortunate consequences for all the characters.  As Stone asks, "Would you be here . . .  if you were totally innocent . . . either of you?  You used me . . . to ply your dirty trade . . . both of you.  And now I'm using you."  Thus, the play offers a dim view of all its characters: Hallett as ruthless and deceptive; Stone as petty and obsessed; Dee as simultaneously weak and exploitative.

Given this psychological darkness, the play begins to resemble film noir, a genre that stresses human duplicity, betrayal, and hopelessness.  There is no heroism in this scenario and no innocence.  Instead, we are shown variations of weak or evil conduct.  Stone's obsessiveness is the most grotesque and damaging moral deformity.  But neither Hallett nor Dee is without major shortcomings which contribute to their own undoing.  If Hallett had been less brutal toward Stone, if Dee had avoided her illicit relationship with Hallett, neither would have been the object of the fantastic frame-up that will ruin their lives.  And so what we are left with is a sense of ironic design in the plot rather than with any strong impression of either sorrow or satisfaction for the fate of the characters.

THE PLOT.

A man named Stone has appealed to John Hallett, a London police detective, for help in dealing with his son's criminal difficulties.  Stone asks Hallett to come to his flat ostensibly to meet the son, a supposed drug dealer now being menaced by his confederates.  However, the son has apparently left the apartment in haste, perhaps out of fear of reprisals from his fellow criminals.  As Hallett and Stone wait for him to return, the latter tidies up the flat, with Hallett lending an occasional helping hand, at one moment picking up a carving knife that drops to the floor.  Finally the telephone rings, Stone answers, and reports to Hallett that his son will be unable to meet the policeman until 8:00 p.m. that night.  Stone gives Hallett his coat, and the detective promises to return later.

After Hallett leaves, we see Stone carry out what the script calls "a set of clearly rehearsed movements," collecting cigar butts and ashes, the dropped carving knife, and a button, and placing them all carefully in a carrying bag.   Stone then makes two mysterious telephone calls, and the first scene comes to an end.

As the second scene begins we notice a striking change in the apartment: "the room is much tidier and looks far more homely. . . .  There is general evidence, perhaps, of a woman's touch."  Again we see Stone performing elaborately planned activities, "mentally running through his checklist."  After a few moments his second visitor of the day arrives, Dee Redmond, a successful young writer of detective thrillers for television.  Dee has come on a mission of mercy, Stone having told her that his terminally-ill wife would be deeply gratified by a kind word about a detective story she has written--one in which the detective is the hunted rather than the hunter.  However, Stone explains, the wife, asleep in the adjoining bedroom, is having difficulty gathering enough strength to get out of bed.  Thus Stone and Dee wait, chatting and drinking.

Since Dee is a mystery writer, the talk turns to murder, and we learn that she achieved her first success with a television play about a real killing that took place six years earlier, when she was a newspaper reporter in the town where the crime occurred.  Says Stone, "had you not met those unfortunate people . . . you might still be working on a local newspaper. . . . Their end being your beginning you might say."

The conversation turns more sinister as Stone reveals a morbid fascination with carefully-executed killings, especially murders committed for revenge.  Eventually he begins to discuss the possibility of killing Dee, noting how easy such an act would be under the circumstances.  As Dee recoils, Stone remembers his ailing wife, runs to her bedroom, and then explains that he has left her pills in his car.

Shortly after he rushes from the apartment, Hallett arrives.  He and Dee clearly know one another, and each is shocked at finding the other in this place.  We instantly realize that they are intimate acquaintances.  When Dee explains that she has come to see Stone's wife, Hallett informs her that Stone is a widower.  When they enter the bedroom to confront its inhabitant, they find a dummy under the covers.  And when they examine what Stone claimed was his wife's empty pill bottle, they discover Dee's name on the label.  Stone has somehow managed to steal them from her apartment.  With these unsettling revelations, the first act ends.

The second act begins with Dee and Hallett still alone in the apartment, nervously speculating about Stone's motives in bringing them there.  Perhaps, they surmise, he is some sort of private investigator, hired by Hallett's wife to probe the details of his affair with Dee.  As they explore this possibility, we note the tension in their relationship, Dee declaring that Hallett will now "have to consider making an honest woman of me, rather than having your cake and stuffing it."

Finally Stone returns, and begins a gloating explanation of his behavior.  Six years earlier his wife and son were brutally murdered, and Hallett apprehended Stone as the prime suspect.  Hallett grilled Stone mercilessly, even beating him at one point.  Ultimately he was released without being charged with the crime, but the experience, which he calls a "twenty-four-hour nightmare," ruined his life.

The real provocation to revenge, however, occurred some time after the interrogation, when Stone, having lost his third job, found himself in a pub on the same night that Hallett was celebrating a promotion with his police colleagues.  Stone looked Hallett in the face, and realized that the detective no longer recognized him.  "You gave me twenty four hours of hell and you didn't even recognize me," Stone declares.  It is the bitterness prompted by his utter disappearance from Hallett's consciousness that has moved him to his bizarre plot.  And now, finally, he is able to take his revenge against the man who caused his misery, and the woman who turned it into a television play.

The vehicle of his vengeance is another murder, this time of Hallett's wife.  Stone claims that he has killed her, making her death look like the work of her husband and his lover.  Hence the careful collecting of the knife bearing Hallett's finger prints, the cigar butts he has smoked, and the button from his coat.  These, he claims, have been planted on the murder scene to frame the policeman.  In addition, Stone has carefully built a structure of supporting evidence involving false license plates, disguises, and purloined letters.

As he triumphantly finishes his description of his masterful deception, however, Hallett rises to puncture his balloon.  Seizing a knife and pointing it at Stone, the detective reveals that he has recognized his antagonist all along, that he knows his wife has not really been killed by Stone, and that he has nothing but contempt for a man who could express only self-pity six years earlier when his family was slaughtered.  Confronted with the unraveling of his revenge plot, and overcome with self-loathing, Stone seizes Hallett's hand, and plunges the knife into his own stomach.  As he lies dying, he rejoices in the fact that he now has really framed Hallett for a murder—his own.

THE CHARACTERS.

Aristotle tells us that dramatic characters arouse in us the emotions of pity and fear.  Pity, he says, is what we experience when we witness unmerited suffering; fear is the apprehension we feel when we see someone with whom we sympathize subjected to pain.

What is notable about the characters in this play is that all three are in some degree unsympathetic, and all deserve at least some measure of the pain they suffer.  Thus we are able to maintain a certain emotional distance between ourselves and them, the better to appreciate the complexities of the carefully structured plot.

STONE:  We never know for certain whether he killed his family six years earlier.  Hallett is convinced he did, and the issue remains unresolved, a matter of the policeman's instinctive certainty against Stone's protestations of innocence.  What we do know about Stone is that he is extremely methodical, capable of planning and carrying out a crime while evading the appearance of guilt—at least that is what he demonstrates through most of the second act.  We also know from the stage directions that he is "humorless," "prissy," and "nondescript"—the latter being a quality that might well allow a criminal to escape detection.

The non-descriptness also serves as a motivating force in Stone's personality.  He cannot bear his own unimportance, the insignificance brought home to him that night in the pub by his invisibility in Hallett's eyes.  When the detective virtually looks through him, it is as if Stone is being annihilated.  The same sense of non-being overcame him years earlier when his estranged wife, on the night of her death, told him that she had secured a court order prohibiting him from visiting his son: "If you could have heard her voice.  The utter satisfaction.  I went out and I walked.  In a complete blank.  The more I walked the more blank I became."  That blankness, a form of nonexistence or disappearance, is quite close to the obliteration he feels in the pub.  The latter experience prompts him to construct an elaborate revenge plot.  Might the former have moved him to kill his wife?  "It is astonishing how the mind can fester," he tells Dee at one point, "Especially if it has nothing else to exercise it."  A mind filled with nothing but a single morbid obsession is itself a deficiency—entirely appropriate for this negligible man.

And above all, Stone wants Hallett and Dee to experience the same misery he did during and after his interrogation:
 
     DEE.  He wants to make us suffer.  As he suffered, in exactly the same 
     circumstances—that's it, isn't it?
     STONE. Bravo.

Thus he frames them for a crime of which they are not guilty, forcing them to undergo the same kind of spiritual extinction he has suffered: "what you will say . . . is . . . that you were inveigled into coming here by a madman who has committed murder and, because of his hatred of you has done everything . . . to have you charged with that murder.  You are the innocent victims of a malignant mind.  And once again . . . it will be your word against mine."

In any case, Stone's ultimate act of retaliation is entirely consistent with his feelings of insignificance and nonentity.  Rather than killing Hallett, he kills himself, achieving revenge through self annihilation.

HALLETT: The playwright tells us directly that Hallett is "in his early 40s.  He has goodish looks going a little puffy round the eyes through too many long sessions with too many short drinks.  He has a deceptively casual manner . . . but has a short fuse and doesn't suffer . . . fools gladly."  Like Stone, then, Hallett conceals feelings, knowledge, and motives.  Behind the "big flat smile" that he constantly flashes we find a man who is shrewdly perceptive and quite capable of violence in pursuit of his goals--"an arrogant pig" in his own words.

His deceptiveness is apparent not only in the long game of cat-and-mouse he plays with Stone, but also in his relations with his own wife and with Dee.  He has been cheating on the former for years, having begun his affair with Dee at the time Stone's wife was murdered, six years earlier.  Toward Dee he is noncommittal.  She pushes him to divorce his wife and marry her, but he wants to continue living his double love-life, "having [his] cake and stuffing it," as Dee says.  Indeed, according to Stone, Hallett criticizes Dee to his policeman friends, complaining that he is in "'the clutches of a neurotic bitch who is beginning to make life hell for me.'"  Hallett denies having made the remark, but the playwright undercuts him by telling us that he makes his disavowal "unconvincingly."

Later in the play, when Dee discovers that Hallett has known all along that Stone's story of murder and framing was a ruse, she is enraged that her lover has allowed her to be dragged trough this terrifying ordeal when he might have crushed Stone at the outset.  She sees the real Hallett as if for the first time and she recoils: "You bastard . . . you evil bastard," she calls him.  Thus Hallett ends up being despised by the only other characters in the play, resented for his manipulativeness, his cruelty, and his ruthlessness in pursuing his own disguised intentions.

DEE:  A successful author of murder thrillers who cannot bear actually being involved in the kind of situation she writes about, Dee is a study in contrasts:

• A successful reporter and playwright, she has built a solid career for herself.  And yet she is wracked by personal insecurity and anxiety.  As Hallett brutally tells her when he explains why he withheld the truth about Stone from her, "You can't get a tax demand without reaching for the Valium."

• She responds to Stone's appeal on behalf of his imaginary ailing wife (the only unselfish act in the whole play), but she is also willing to use other people's suffering as material for her fiction.

• She claims that Hallett, her reliable source for inside information about criminal events and investigative procedure, is her "tame" policeman.  But she has certainly not been able to domesticate him in their sexual relationship.

These contradictions make her the most vulnerable, and therefore the most sympathetic, character in the play.  But they also contribute to our sense that she is rather unstable and perhaps fundamentally incapable of dealing with the real world, comfortable only in the fictions she creates for television.  And in her willing participation in Hallett's deception of his wife, she seems capable of her own brand of cruelty and deceit.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.

1. Why is the significance of the play's title?

2. Do you think Stone was guilty of killing his wife and son?

3. If not, do you think his attempt to avenge himself was justified?

4. Do you think Stone really killed Hallett's wife?

5. Why does Stone kill himself?

6. Had Stone been planning to kill himself all along?

7. What will happen to Hallett and Dee when Spiros arrives?