The Mysterious Affair at Grim Meadow

The cozy, wartime mysteries of "Clue."

One of the first podcasts I started listening to when the pandemic began is called “Phoebe Reads a Mystery.” It’s a spinoff of the series “Criminal,” which could be described as the jewel in the crown of the true crime sub-genre known as “whispery murder.” It’s partly the sound—the soft, urgent voicing of host Phoebe Judge—and partly the show’s tone, which is gentle and conversational, even when the topic at hand is a grisly post-mortem. My husband’s catch-all term for any crime story that takes place in Great Britain is “Grim Meadow” (which can also be styled à la “Broadchurch” as “Grimmeadow.”) Back in March, despite not being British, “Phoebe Reads a Mystery” was instantly deemed “Grim Meadow” fare, and I was left to enjoy its whispering plotlines on my own. 

The series began with Phoebe reading “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” which is the Agatha Christie novel that introduced the world to detective Hercule Poirot. It’s also credited with launching the genre of the cozy mystery when it was published in 1920. The plot of “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” has all the elements of a cozy murder: the setting is a great house in the English countryside, there’s an elderly woman with a complicated and recently altered will, there’s the crime itself, there are relatives and associates who each have plausible motives for having committed the crime, and there’s a Belgian refugee from World War I conveniently on hand to solve the murder, apparently in no great hurry.

I was never an Agatha Christie person growing up, so getting acclimated to the dry humor of “Styles” as I listened was a fresh delight. It got me thinking about “Gosford Park,” which we rented and enjoyed sometime later that month (curiously, perhaps because it’s good, “Gosford Park” escaped designation as “Grim Meadow” fodder.) Then we followed it with the campy 1985 movie “Clue,” which is...not great. It’s a shame given the stellar ensemble cast: it starred Madeleine Khan, Christopher Lloyd, Martin Mull and Tim Curry, to name a few. I watched it solo.

I played the game of Clue more times than I could count as a kid; it was always a slumber party staple. I loved the characters, with names that sounded like more refined ways to describe the colors of the game pieces: Plum, Scarlet, Peacock, and Mustard. And I was intrigued by the fustiness of a room called “The Conservatory,” which I didn’t realize was a greenhouse, and not a music academy, until I was well into adulthood. When the movie came out I was a bit too young for a black comedy, but I noted its release with interest. How odd, I thought, to base a film on a board game, of all things. After I watched it this spring, I read up on it, only to realize—almost literally slapping my forehead—that I had it backwards. It’s not so much that the movie is based on the game; rather, the game is based on the literary genre of the cozy mystery: murder, mansion, and all. The movie was just an attempt to bring it back to its native form, capitalizing on decades of brand name recognition. One reason it didn’t quite work might be that it was set in America. (We’ll come back to that.)

The game is called Cluedo in its native Britain. It’s a play on words: “Ludo,” the brand name of a popular British board game that’s based on Pachisi, is Latin for “I play.” It was invented by a musician named Anthony E. Pratt (1903–1994). In the 1920s and ‘30s, Pratt earned his living by playing the piano in lots of glamorous places: at hotels in the countryside, at parties, and on cruise ships traveling the world. Interviewed later in life by a British newspaper, he described the party circuit thus: ''Between the wars, all the bright young things would congregate in each other's homes for parties at weekends. We'd play a stupid game called Murder, where guests crept up on each other in corridors and the victim would shriek and fall on the floor.'' Pratt got to observe something like a real life cozy mystery, sans murder, weekend after weekend in estate after estate. During World War II, he was working as a fire warden in Leeds when it occurred to him that he could turn his experience of observing those weekend party games into a clever pastime with just a bit of cardboard and some game pieces. In 1943 he devised the game of Cluedo (which he originally called “Murder!”) working with his wife Elva, who designed the game board.

He patented the game in 1947, and that same year the British game manufacturer Waddington’s bought it, as did Parker Brothers (now Hasbro) in America. It was released, initially with a real piece of cord as the rope game piece, in 1949. According to the Strong Museum of Play in Atlanta (where Clue is in the National Toy Hall of Fame) it remains a top-ten selling game to this day, right up there with Scrabble. The design has evolved, and objects like the lead pipe token have been updated to steel or pewter for safety reasons. But the essential structure of the game, in which the players must determine who killed Mr. Boddy, with which implement, and in which room, hasn’t changed. 

The most intriguing thing about it though (I say this as someone who isn't really “a board game person,” I hasten to clarify) is that it’s an exercise in democratizing the cozy mystery. Let’s start with the house. Clue takes place in what’s usually described as a “Victorian mansion,” which is practically synonymous with “horror movie setting” in America. But in Britain, the kind of mysteries that inspired Pratt took place in the same kinds of country estates where he played music and observed the hosts playing “Murder” on weekends. A house like Styles, to use Agatha Christie’s example, would likely be large, date from sometime between the mid-17th and early 19th centuries, and have wings, which would mean a very wide rectangular floor plan with multiple stories. To make the Clue house translate into the flat world of a game board, the Pratts essentially had to collapse it into a single story home, where each room is roughly the same size, all radiating out from a central hall. Perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps not, the floor-plan in the game—though very weird, architecturally—is more relatable in scale than a great estate. In other words, it’s (almost) middle class. 

One of the features of the cozy mystery genre is that it tends to trap its characters in a specific place, like a house during a rainstorm, or a train during a blizzard, as in “Murder on the Orient Express.” This device puts different kinds of people who wouldn't ordinarily interact in uncomfortable proximity, and is so well-established that it inspired one of the funniest storylines in “Gosford Park”: the exploits of the hapless American movie producer (played with genius by Bob Balaban) and his traveling companion (Ryan Phillippe) who’s posing as a servant as research for a movie role. They don’t understand the rules of the house, or “get” hunting, and they make themselves the unwitting objects of ridicule. In the film, the servants understand the rules of the game better than the rich, unschooled visitors from America.

Bob Balaban and Jeremy Northam in “Gosford Park,” Directed by Robert Altman, 2001

In “Murder on the Orient Express,” the characters include a governess, a doctor, the director of the railway company, a Russian princess and her maid, and an uncouth American businessman and his secretary, among other passengers from all walks of life. No one likes the uncouth American guy. The train has trapped this group of people—titled nobility, credentialed professionals, businessmen, servants, and Poirot—together, under stress and suspicion. They can’t relate to one another but they’re bound to one another as their shared emergency unfolds. The aristocrats are only accustomed to having servants around. The peculiar agony of this scenario probably has an American equivalent, but mostly it’s just very, very English. Among Agatha Christie’s talents as a writer was her ability to capture the subtleties of her evolving society and its class ecosystem in the 20th century, using murder mysteries as a scaffolding for the tensions, suspicion, and fear that resulted from all that change.

Scene from the movie version of “Murder on the Orient Express” directed by Sydney Lumet, 1974.

In designing Clue, Pratt did away with the class hierarchy of weekend Murder parties and made the parts he loved best—the puzzle and the mystery—accessible to anyone by transforming it into a game with a curious, impossible floor-plan, and names like “Mustard” and “Peacock” that poke fun at posh, ancestral pith helmet types. Learning about Pratt’s story—including the fact that due to signing an unfavorable contract early on, he missed out on most of the riches from the game’s sales (his life story sounds a bit more like an unfortunate turn at Monopoly, sadly) has made me want to play it again, and to toast Pratt’s wartime inventiveness and sly wit. Since it’s essentially the board game version of Grim Meadow, it’ll likely be just me. In the living room. With the cats. Duly entertained.