M is for murder . . . actors improvise and audience participates

The Caroling Catastrophe cast are ready for tonight’s opening performance. Pictured from left, standing: Dorothy Fletcher, Wendy Dewstow, Paula Hatten, Fraser Grout, Amber Aitkenhead, Rachel Crawford, Phillippa Sherry, Arran Dunn. Seated: Julie McPhail and Christine McKnight. Missing: Michael Jones. Pictures supplied

Don’t be deceived by appearances. Dorothy M Fletcher may seem like a mild mannered, choral-singing retiree, but in truth she has a penchant for murder . . . Dorothy has written Caroling Catastrophe which opens at Unity Theatre tonight.

She is the self-published author of six murder mystery books including a series called The Abandoned Wives and Widows Club, and another called The Deathly Series.

Dorothy is soon to publish the fourth novels in each series. She has also written seven murder mystery plays for the theatre and four that have taken place on the steam train over Labour Weekend annually.

Dorothy was born in Leicestershire, England, and moved to New Zealand with her husband, Graham and their two children Liz and Simon in 1979. She worked as a radiotherapy radiographer in Palmerston North when they first arrived, but a back injury meant she was forced to find another profession, so she trained to be a school teacher.

She discovered a talent for storytelling while teaching at Cannons Creek School, a low-decile school in Porirua, Wellington.

“I always believed that stories are so important to children. I would bring out a book to read to the class and noticed they would immediately start fidgeting,” she said.

So she tried a different approach.

“I asked them what sort of story they wanted, who the characters should be, where it should be set, what sort of things would they like in it, and then I would make it up.

“I could go for about 20 minutes to half an hour like this and would always finish it with a cliffhanger.

“One student actually said they only came to school because they wanted to hear the next episode of the story.”

Dorothy has written three children’s books which have each been shortlisted for the Tom Fitzgibbons Award and a picture book shortlisted in  the Joy Cowley Award.

But she said it was not easy finding a publisher or an agent so she decided to self-publish.

“I love writing, but I don’t enjoy marketing myself. It doesn’t come naturally.”

As well as singing with the Gisborne Choral Society, Dorothy has also taken part in amateur theatre in Gisborne. She played Cookie Cusack in Rumors at Evolution Theatre earlier this year and was then cast as a man playing Vincentio in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.

But it is her love for writing murder mysteries that sustains her.

When her husband died 12 years ago she enrolled in a creative writing course with Mandy Hager in Whitireia, Porirua.

To be accepted for the programme she had to submit an idea for a book which she then worked on over the course of the year.

This was the birth of Cupboards Full of Skeletons — a novel about a group of Gisborne senior citizens who try to solve a murder. They create mayhem around the town and annoy the police, but eventually have to delve into the dark side of life to find the murderer and bring them to justice.

Dorothy got into writing murder mysteries for the theatre mostly by chance when she was asked by Unity Theatre to help with a murder mystery they were to put on as a fundraiser at Lawson Field Theatre.

“They’d bought the script, but weren’t very happy with it — so I helped to rewrite it.”

After this she was approached by Musical Theatre Gisborne to see if she could perhaps write a murder mystery they could put on as a fundraiser.

Twelve murder mysteries later, Dorothy wrote Caroling Catastrophe.