a man has to make his own way—has to look after himself—and his family, too, of course, when he has one—and so long as he does that he won’t come to much harm.

Like any mystery novel or play, there’s a danger in spending too much time explaining much about it. And this one is little different. On the one hand this is a quite successful and brilliant play in a lot of ways. It not only creates an effective and engaging dramatic scene, but it also completely complicates and subverts a lot of the same tropes and conventions it relies on to tell the story.

It’s a lot like Clue and The Mousetrap in this way, and of course this one came first.

In addition, this story reminds me a lot of GK Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, in that it’s a spy book about spy books, but it’s also a lot more to boot.

So what we have here is a kind of failure to articulate. The play begins in a living room at a high brow/high class estate. We meet a family, as always headed up by a colonel, and we meet the young man they are positioning to marry their daughter. A familiar scene. From there, an inspector calls on the house to explain that a young woman in town has killed herself and there’s a connection to the family. I feel like I can’t really tell you more than that however. I can also imagine the ways in which this story might unfold in front of us in a theater, and not knowing what’s to come there’s a clear narrative tension that builds and builds toward the conclusion. And I would also argue that a reread or a viewing after reading also allows for the rich layering of the story to be charted from the beginning.

(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Inspector-Calls-Acting-Theater-Productions/dp/0822205726/ref=sr_1_1?crid=37V5EQKBNFDSF&keywords=an+inspector+calls+play&qid=1553103818&s=gateway&sprefix=an+inspe%2Caps%2C261&sr=8-1)