It is 1940 and Mrs Mudge, the cleaning lady, is busy tidying the Little Theatre in Lulverton, which is run by the local amateur dramatics' society. But she is in for a surprise when she finds a corpse in the ticket office, stabbed with a dagger - a prop from the society's latest play, Measure for Measure.

The novel is in two sections. In the first, the narrator, Vaughn Tudor, describes the formation of the small amateur theatre group, in a sleepy village on the South Coast in the period leading up to the Second World War. But then in the second half, after the revelation of the identity of the victim and the calling in of Witting's series detective Inspector Charlton to investigate, the reader finds out that there were rather a lot of people who had cause to visit that little theatre on the night of the murder... But can the police disentangle the complicated relationships to discover the real killer?

First published in 1941, it was the fifth of Witting's novels.