San Francisco Chronicle

Dr. Death's Mystery Ride

By Michael Robertson

It is a dark and foggy night. The Hornblower dining yacht City of San Francisco ploughs the waves between the Bay Bridge and Alcatraz, and then it turns around and ploughs them back again.

Veiled in mist, the lights of the city are like a thousand will-of-the-wisps. It is a view to be enjoyed as much with the imagination as the eye.

But none of the diners or the dancers wearing the black stockings with seams running up the back of the leg or the shiny old-fashioned tuxes with wide lapels care a fig for the fog.

They have murder on their minds. People have been dying like flies.

Not literally. Not on windowsills with their legs sticking up in the air.

But they have certainly been dying frequently.

The janitor was found floating in the bay. Next, the busybody was pithed with a poison dart. Suddenly, Harry, the confidential assistant, comes staggering through the dining room with a knife in his gizzard. He staggers up and he staggers down and then he staggers around. If he staggers much longer, he will die of old age instead of a knife in the gizzard.

Oh! He dies.

And then he trips nimbly downstairs to the main deck and dies all over again for the other half of the customers paying $65 a head to play detective.

"Working two decks is hard." confides Janet Rudolph (a.k.a. Dr. Death), who killed Harry for money, just as she killed the janitor and the busybody.

The Scripted Evening

She kills with a quill. She is a scholar-turned-writer-turned entrepreneur.

As owner and operator of Murder on the Menu, Rudolph prefers the intimacy of a hotel banquet room to the mystery evenings aboard a Hornblower yacht because it's hard to hustle her actors through their tightly scripted evening of clues, confrontations and outrages when everything has to be done double.

Still, in spite of the logistical difficulties and the blare of the dance band, at the end of the evening a table of diners gets all the murderers right.

"Well, one of them is a professional mystery writer," Rudolph confides, "so he knew just what to ignore."

Quick cut: Janet Rudolph sits in the living room of her Berkeley home and explains how she became the Bay Area's maven of mayhem.

It is a room cluttered with Sherlock Holmes memorabilia as well as the kind of pocket-sized souvenirs picked up by foreign travelers with limited space in their suitcase.

Her cat, Dashiell Hammett, lies under a chair, licking his paw and relishing his sins.

Agatha Christie would feel right at home.

Five Years of Murder

Rudolph has been in the murder game for five years. She literally is a crime doctor, having earned a joint doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union writing on the connection between murder mysteries and religion.

She also teaches classes on the mystery novel at local colleges and is the founding editor of the MRA (Mystery Readers of America) Journal.

Her reputation as a mystery expert got her a job as scriptwriter for a since-defunct firm creating murder evenings. Convinced she could do a better job, she went out on her own.

She has succeeded, she says, not so much because her mysteries are well-written -- "though they are" -- but because she has a head for business.

Rudolph stages an average of three mysteries a month. She doesn't rent a hall and take the big risks. She gets a flat fee, concentrating on the corporate market.

Clients have included the Marriott, 3Com Corporation and Hewlett-Packard. Prices can go as high as $5,000 a weekend if the mystery requires much new scripting to involve a particular set of guests or line of business.

She provides a complete package, including a troupe of 10 actors who have perfected the art of talking about intimate things in a loud voice, so crucial conversations come ricocheting off the back wall.

Since she spreads paper clues among the participants and this information must be ferreted out by guest mingling with guest, her programs make good icebreakers for the first nights of national or international business conclaves. The idea is team building, interdependence.

The notion of crime-solving as a model of global cooperation is an argument she uses with old friends who remember her as a Berkeley activist -- she has lived here for 20 years -- and chastise her for staging "frivolous parties that cost a lot of money."

No Life Plan

It wasn't what she planned to do with herself. Actually, she didn't plan to do anything in particular.

"I never did prepare for a real life," she says. "That's why this is so exciting at 42."

Rudolph did her undergraduate work in religious thought and English literature at the University of Pennsylvania, a combination as stimulating as it was useless.

"I came right before they pulled the rug out from under us women by telling us we should have a career," she says. "Before that it was 'Live and enjoy,' instead of 'Prepare!'"

Enrolled at the Graduate Theological Union to study art and religion, she turned after a couple of false starts to mystery novels as a thesis topic because what seems simple is actually multi-faceted.

Some of her professors did look at her askance when she suggested detective fiction as a thesis topic. "But I had proven myself as a scholar -- I read a million languages! Actually, I read five very well and am comfortable in two or three others."

Also, she says the connection between religion and the concerns of mystery fiction is obvious. "It's good vs. evil, the conquering of evil by good. The earliest mystery is the story of Cain and Abel."

Of course, if you look at the battle between good and evil over the millenia, it would appear that evil is ahead on points.

Ah, but mystery novels provide an escape from so sour a view of life.

"It is a catharsis to solve the crime, to resolve it," Rudolph says. "Justice has to be done. Crimes in the real world aren't solved and the criminal gets off. But the mysteries I read and write are tied up in a bow at the end."

But things are never that simple, not really.

The Real Mystery

(Fade to fog and footsteps and the sound of water slapping against metal.)

The real mystery of the raucous evening on the Hornblower Dining Yacht was the beautiful young man dressed like a beautiful young woman in a stunning off-the-shoulder dress.

He was not part of the entertainment -- not intentionally. But the Hornblower Cruise was a benefit for the Art Deco Society of California, and there the beautiful young man was in full '30s regalia, looking like a motive for something, all right.

"Did you notice his back?" Rudolph asks. She pauses. "No muscles. No muscles."

That's how mystery writers are. What you and I call life, they see as an endless parade of clues.

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