Simon Brett's multifarious and intense mystery productivity includes psychological suspense and an innovative female sleuth, but the invention of the middle- aged actor-sleuth Charles Paris and his London theater milieu remains his signature creation. Such writers as Edmund Crispin, Ngaio Marsh, and Anne Morice had popularized the theater mystery as a combination of crime fiction and the comedy of manners. Brett's titles alluding to the stage--including Cast, in Order of Disappearance (1975), Star Trap (1977), A Comedian Dies (1979), Situation Tragedy (1981), and Murder Unprompted (1982)--indeed place him in that tradition, as do his stage-oriented settings, with one-man shows, Shakespearean parallels, and farces both onstage and off. Brett expanded the potential of the theater mystery to incorporate satire and social critique, however. Despite his avowed goal to entertain, he clearly strives for more. As E. D. Huntley observes in the Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction (1988), Brett's "intimate knowledge of backstage...