Mystery Comedy / Characters: 7 male, 3 female

Scenery: 2 Interiors

In this popular American mystery play, incident is piled on incident with skill and plausibility, and it is impossible to know who the real criminal is until the final curtain. This thriller revolves around Cornelia Van Gorder, a maiden lady of sixty, who rents the summer home of a banker reported killed in Colorado. She is warned that mysterious things are happening but she refuses to move. Then it is discovered that a large sum is missing from the dead man's bank and it is suspected that, far from being dead, he stole...

Published here for the first time, "The Great Bordello. A Story of the Theatre" is the work of Jazz-Age playwright Avery Hopwood (1882-1928), benefactor of the Avery and Jule Hopwood Awards Program at the University of Michigan, his alma mater. Hopwood was one of the most successful playwrights of his day, having had four hits running on Broadway in 1920 ("The Gold Diggers," "The Bat" and "Spanish Love" (both co-authored with Mary Roberts Rinehart) and "Ladies' Night (In a Turkish Bath)," co-authored with Charlton Andrews. Although Hopwood amassed a fortune writing Times Square...

About the Book- Mary Roberts Rinehart (August 12, 1876 - September 22, 1958) was an American writer, often called the American Agatha Christie, although her first mystery novel was published 14 years before Christie's.She is considered the source of the phrase "The butler did it," although she did not actually use the phrase. She is considered to have invented the "Had-I-But-Known" school of mystery writing. She also created a costumed supercriminal called "the Bat," who was cited by Bob Kane as one of the inspirations for his "Batman." -Wikipedia