How It Began
I met my mystery entertainment mentor in 1988. He was quite the character. The winter Olympics had just arrived in Calgary AB and I was hired on by his theme entertainment company in Banff AB as production manager. For four years, on and off, I helped write and produce mystery entertainment and manage various themed entertainment shows while procuring weird props.
My first mission was to find the perfect pair of mukluks and a stage crew willing to carry 200 trees up a two story fire escape at midnight – for beer. Beer was common currency those days.
I learned a lot from that character, my boss – good and bad, and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. However I decided enough was enough at 2:00 AM one cold winter night, when the RCMP called …
“We’ve picked up a couple of transients walking down the middle of main street with a $10,000 rug and a silver cake platter . . . Juanita, they say they were working for you.”
Well these two guys were our stage crew who were hired by my boss. He promised to pay them with pizza and beer. They were living in an old, beat up ‘fish & chip’ truck, with no heat, down by the river. It was winter in the Rockies, – 20 degrees below centigrade. The crew decided to grab the rug off the dance floor of a very elite hotel to help keep them warm at night. The cake on the platter was because they were hungry.
Phone calls from the cops at 2:00 am, and many other forms of chaos and confusion doesn’t work for me in the long term, so I quit the company but I had already caught the exciting possibility of murder mystery entertainment.
In 1992 I formed my own corporate entertainment company, MASTERPIECE MYSTERYS, based in Vancouver, BC. Researching other mystery entertainment companies, I found that they fell into one of two types.
The first type of event produced a mystery that actually had clues and could be solved, but was boring as a toothpick. The second type was very entertaining but had no clues whatsoever, guests guessed a random solution or the producer’s friend or the drunkest table won.
Determined to produce events that were entertaining as well as ‘Fairplay’ I obsessively analyzed Agatha Christie, studied Rex Stout and picked apart Sherlock Holmes. Filled with enthusiasm and having the ability to quickly solve problems on the spot, clients and co-workers raved about the fun and satisfaction they experienced working with me – and me with them. The result was thirty years of hilarious entertainment which actually had clues that could be followed to a solution and audiences having the time of their lives.
From those years of writing and producing live murder mystery entertainment Mystery Factory was born and became my focus when I moved back to the Rocky Mountains. I still get calls asking for shows but have decided that my current lifestyle better suits an online business. My scripts sell to a world wide audience and I have branched out into plot consulting. 100% of the writers who come to me, stuck in their story and feeling discouraged, have left their consultation eager to get back to their writing.
[…] your baby over to someone else. I am lucky enough to be married to a detail-oriented prolific reader and writer with an analytical mind. When she edits my stories she sees everything I cannot. If you know someone who can really see […]