Sign-In
Cart
Bloody Broadway - Plays of Menace, Murder, and Mystery - Volume 1 1900-1930
Hardcover
Publisher: BearManor Media
Published: Aug 19 2025
Pages: 448
Weight: 1.69
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The entity known as Broadway began with several stage contributions by the American playwright-actor-director William Gillette. Gillette's major success was Sherlock Holmes, a compilation of half-a-dozen short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle into a cohesive plot line. It played at Manhattan's Garrick Theatre, garnered positive reviews, and ran for 256 performances. During the decade of 1900-1910, a number of prolific melodramatists whipped up various four-act plays featuring plays of crime and punishment populated by flamboyant villains, brawny heroes, and damsels in distress. Hal Reid's heroines went through dangerous cliffhangers. Clyde Fitch introduced elements that became hallmarks of detective fiction - the innocent party entrapped by circumstantial evidence as a murder suspect, the lack of alibi, and the sharp cross-examination of the suspect before the attorney of the defense agrees to take on the case. In Owen Davis's Nellie, the Beautiful Cloak Girl (1906), an inheritor of a fortune goes through a series of attempts on her life, by knives, pistols, and bombs. George M. Cohan set the frightening action of Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913) in a vacant lodge during a stormy night. Elmer Rice inserted in On Trial (1914) cinematic flashbacks to cover the events that preceded a murder trial. John Willard was hailed for the ingenious use of secret panels and sliding doors in The Cat and the Canary (1922).
Acts of crime began to emerge in the works of notable playwrights, albeit in a more subtle approach-August Strindberg, Maxim Gorky, Bertolt Brecht-providing psychological insights. From England came to Broadway plays of betrayal, violence, and detection by W. Somerset Maugham, J. B. Priestley, and Daphne du Maurier, followed by the French Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Jean Genet, the Hungarian Laszlo Fodor, the German Ernst Toller, the Spanish Garcia Lorca, and the Italian Ugo Betti.
Also, mixing their ink with blood were the American novelists Damon Runyon, James Baldwin, Arthur Miller, and William Faulkner, as well as the Nobel Prize winners Eugene O'Neil, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway.
The book's entries are presented chronologically and include a plot synopsis, production data, opinions by critics, and biographical sketches of playwrights and key actors-directors.
Amnon Kabatchnik, now retired, was a professor of theater at SUNY Binghamton, Stanford University, Ohio State University, and Elmira College. He directed numerous dramas, comedies, thrillers, and musicals in New York and across the United States. He is the author of Sherlock Holmes on the Stage, Courtroom Dramas on the Stage, Horror on the Stage, Murder in the East End, as well as the seven-volume series, Blood on the Stage.
1 different editions
Also available
Bloody Broadway - Plays of Menace, Murder, and Mystery - Volume 1 1900-1930
Kabatchnik, Amnon
Paperback
Also from
Kabatchnik, Amnon
Bloody Broadway - Plays of Menace, Murder and Mystery - Volume II 1930-1960
Kabatchnik, Amnon
Hardcover
Murder in the West End Volume II: The Plays of Agatha Christie and Her Disciples
Kabatchnik, Amnon
Paperback
Murder in the West End Volume II (hardback): The Plays of Agatha Christie and Her Disciples
Kabatchnik, Amnon
Hardcover
Murder in the West End: The Plays of Agatha Christie and Her Disciples Volume 1
Kabatchnik, Amnon
Paperback
Murder in the West End (hardback): The Plays of Agatha Christie and Her Disciples Volume 1
Kabatchnik, Amnon
Hardcover
Bloody Broadway - Plays of Menace, Murder, and Mystery - Volume 1 1900-1930
Kabatchnik, Amnon
Paperback
Bloody Broadway - Plays of Menace, Murder and Mystery - Volume II 1930-1960
Kabatchnik, Amnon
Paperback
Also in
Plays
Four Comedies: The Taming of the Shrew, a Midsummer Night's Dream, the Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night
Shakespeare, William
Paperback
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem
Miller, Arthur
Paperback
The Greek Tragedies: Seventeen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Euripides
Paperback
The Laramie Project and the Laramie Project: Ten Years Later
Pierotti, Greg
Kaufman, Moises
Fondakowski, Leigh
Paperback
FRANKENSTEIN or The Modern Prometheus (The Revised 1831 Edition - Wisehouse Classics)
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Paperback
Four Major Plays: A Doll's House/Ghosts/Hedda Gabler/The Master Builder
Arup, Jens
Ibsen, Henrik
McFarlane, James
Paperback
A Doll's House and Other Plays: With Pillars of the Community, Ghosts and an Enemy of the People
Ibsen, Henrik
Paperback
KJV, Pew Bible, Large Print, Hardcover, Burgundy, Red Letter Edition (Large Print Edition)
Thomas Nelson
Hardcover
Our Town and the Cosmic One-Acts: The Long Christmas Dinner, the Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, and Pullman Car Hiawatha
Wilder, Thornton
Paperback
Five Plays: Ivanov, the Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and the Cherry Orchard
Hingley, Ronald
Chekhov, Anton
Paperback