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Nefarious crimes have a natural home in libraries. Book lined shelves have witnessed murders, mayhem, lies and resolutions in hundreds of mystery stories by renowned authors such as Agatha Christie and Anne Perry.  

This holiday season another murder mystery will haunt another library – the West Berkeley Public Library. Dec. 28, five teens will transform into five suspicious suspects, each with a secret motive for murdering the victim. The audience, formed into teams of detectives, will spend about an hour interviewing suspects and gathering the vital information to solve the crime.  

Francisca Goldsmith, the senior librarian in the Teen Center of the west branch of the library has been organizing the murder mystery program for six years. She laughs just talking about it. 

“My favorite one we ever did was just so over the top in terms of incredibility,” she said. “When the murder was solved the mother was also united with her identical twin children – one of whom was male, one female, one white, one Asian.” 

Several teens volunteer to help Goldsmith write a new story each year, a process that, she said, “takes a lot of gestation time.”  

“It’s more the details that are difficult to make up, especially the red herrings,” she said, adding no matter how much they scheme, the script inevitably changes to highlight the talents of the actors performing it.  

Albert Kung, 16, helped write and act out the story for the performance both last year and this one. He enjoys the acting and, “the playing around with people’s minds,” he said, adding that the actors may not always tell the truth. 

The night of the performance, the actors situate themselves throughout the library – a “businesswomen” spends her time reading the Wall Street Journal and detectives move around to ask the questions. 

“We place the evidence among different library materials so that people realize, ‘Oh they do have videos,’ so there’s that kind of pedagogy going on,” said Goldsmith.  

She made it clear that the library tries to protect any sensitive audience members from the more macabre elements of the mystery story: no victim’s corpse, no gruesome murder weapon. 

“The victim is never sympathetic. The murder weapon is never something that could ever truly be lethal,” she said. “One year the whole murder evolved around the idea of chickens and we used a clay pigeon as the weapon.”  

Goldsmith carefully navigates the tension between verisimilitude and appropriate behavior for the public library. 

“On some occasions we’ve had a scream that starts it all,” she said, chuckling, “and at that point we’ve posted a sign for a week in advance saying, ‘There will be a scream in the library at 7 p.m.’” 

In years past, between 20 and 70 people have shown up to play. The Library Mystery is free, and requires no reservations, although the program is not recommended for children under 12, because of the level of difficulty. Interested participants should be at the library, 1125 University Ave., by 7 p.m. Dec. 28.  

Forget Colonel Mustard, the candlestick and the billiard room. This year it may have happened with a bicycle pump filled with poison gas, or perhaps with dangerous play-dough. But it definitely occurred in the library.