Jeffrey Hatcher's SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE ADVENTURE OF THE SUICIDE CLUB Nominated for Edgar Award

Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of The Suicide Club by Jeffrey Hatcher, which received its acclaimed world premiere at Arizona Theatre Company last fall has been nominated for an Edgar Award in the category Best Play. Each spring, Mystery Writers of America presents the Edgar Awards, widely acknowledged to be the most prestigious awards in the genre.

Mystery Writers of America recently announced the Nominees for the 2012 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction, nonfiction, theatre and television published or produced in 2011. The Edgar® Awards will be presented to the winners at the 66th Gala Banquet, April 26, 2012 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, New York City.

Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of The Suicide Club, directed by ATC Artistic Director David Ira Goldstein, was commissioned and premiered at Arizona Theatre Company last fall. It is the third ATC commission/premiere in the last six years to be nominated for the award following Hatcher's widely produced Dr. Jekyll and Mr, Hyde in 2008 and Steven Dietz's Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure which won the Edgar Award in 2006 and has since received dozens of productions world-wide.

Hatcher's Sherlock Holmes play is loosely suggested by three Robert Louis Stevenson short stories published in 1878 under the title of The Suicide Club. Hatcher's play is set on the eve of World War I, where in the heart of London, behind the impassive facade of a windowless house, some of Europe's most powerful men gather to play a game. The game is murder and this is The Suicide Club. But the Club has a new member: Sherlock Holmes--brilliant, perceptive, the greatest detective in the English-speaking world. Does Holmes wish to die? Will he have to kill? Can his old friend Dr. Watson save him? Or doesn't Holmes want to be saved?

Jeffrey Hatcher is the author of Ten Chimneys, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Ella and co-author of Work Song: Three Views of Frank Lloyd Wright and Tuesdays with Morrie - all of which have been seen on Arizona Theatre Company's stages. Mr. Hatcher authored the book for the Broadway musical, Never Gonna Dance. Off-Broadway, he has had several plays produced, including Three Viewings and A Picasso at Manhattan Theatre Club, Scotland Road and The Turn of the Screw at Primary Stages, Tuesdays with Morrie (with Mitch Albom) at Minetta Lane Theatre, Murder by Poe and The Turn of the Screw with The Acting Company, Neddy at The American Place Theatre and Fellow Travelers at Manhattan Punchline. His plays - among them, Compleat Female Stage Beauty, Mrs. Mannerly, Murderers, Mercy of a Storm, Smash Armadale, Korczak's Children, To Fool the Eye, The Falls, A Piece of the Rope, All the Way with LBJ, The Government Inspector, and Work Song (with Eric Simonson) - have been seen at such theatres as Yale Repertory Theatre, The Old Globe, South Coast Repertory, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intiman Theatre, Florida Stage, The Empty Space, California Theatre Center, Madison Repertory Theatre, Illusion Theater, Denver Center Theatre Company, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, Philadelphia Theatre Company, Coconut Grove Playhouse, Asolo Repertory Theatre, City Theatre, Studio Arena Theatre and dozens more in the U.S. and abroad. Mr. Hatcher wrote the screenplays for Stage Beauty, The Duchess and Casanova, as well as authoring episodes of the Peter Falk series Columbo. He is a member and/or alumnus of The Playwrights' Center, The Dramatists Guild of America, Writers Guild of America and New Dramatists.

Arizona Theatre Company is Arizona's leading professional theatre company engaging over 130,000 audience members each season in the Temple of Music and Art in Tucson and the Herberger Theater Center in Phoenix. For more information about Arizona Theatre Company please visit www.arizonatheatre.org.

For more information about The Edgar Awards please visit www.theedgars.com.

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