Specialized Cruise : Sleuths to Ply Sea of Intrigue

Crime doesn’t pay? Ruth Griffiths hopes it does.

Griffiths is a Woodland Hills travel agent who has reserved 100 cabins on an ocean liner this month to stage a seven-day sea-sleuthing adventure for fans of mystery novels.

Passengers on the April 28 cruise from Los Angeles to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, will help solve a baffling case of international espionage. The plot will be custom-written by an on-board novelist, and the vacationers themselves will be the suspects.

But Griffiths has already launched a manhunt.

She’s trying to track down whodunit buffs who are willing to pay $945 to $1,245 each for the pleasure of having their staterooms “searched” for clues. Those booking passage must also be willing to have their holiday interrupted by grillings from a “police investigator” and a “government agent” who will be part of the caper.

41 ‘Volunteers’

By the end of last week, 41 persons had signed up. Griffiths said she needs at least 60 more to break even and pay for more than a year of planning and promoting the venture.

Griffiths’ crime cruise underscores efforts being made by travel industry officials to keep a growing fleet of pleasure ships filled at a time when sea cruises are still unfamiliar to most Americans.

The 27 companies with luxury liners plying the high seas rushed in the early 1980s to build new ships and refurbish old ones. The cruise business became the fastest-growing segment of the travel industry.

Last year, about 2 million Americans booked passage. However, cruise line officials often resorted to fare-discount schemes, free air transportation and unusual shipboard entertainment promotions to lure them aboard.

Tropicale to Be Setting

“We’ve filled our ships to 100% capacity for 10 years,” said Karen Armstrong Musiel, vice president for marketing for the Miami-based Carnival Cruise Lines. Her company operates the 3-year-old Tropicale, a 1,400-passenger, 660-foot vessel that will be the setting for Griffiths’ mystery cruise. Carnival will launch its fifth cruise ship in July and add two more to its fleet in 1986.

“We have 273 sailings this year, and they will go out full,” Musiel said. “But you couldn’t say it’s no problem to do it. We’ve learned how to fill our ships. We have a $10-million TV ad campaign and a 140-city newspaper campaign and 39 sales people.”

Griffiths’ cruise campaign has been much more modest. But the 54-year-old mother of three has approached the task with gusto--even though the project has taken more twists and turns than an Agatha Christie novel.

She and husband Richard, 58, who works at UCLA, cooked up the mystery cruise idea last year over a Sunday champagne brunch with a friend. The friend put them in contact with the editor of a mystery magazine, who agreed to promote it.

Difficulties Encountered

The cruise was at first planned for last November. But the mystery magazine went out of business, and early promotional material went out with an incorrect toll-free 800-line telephone booking number. Griffiths decided to postpone the effort until this month.

Since then, she has mailed out 300 news releases and announcements about the cruise to U.S. newspapers. Those efforts, coupled with advertisements in mystery magazines, have attracted the sign-ups.

Last October, she and her husband flew to Chicago to attend a convention of mystery writers and drum up interest in the venture. More than 400 authors showed up for the three-day meeting. But the Griffiths’ cruise promotional material almost didn’t.

“I’d spent a fortune express-shipping my brochures and materials back there, only to find when we got there that the hotel had left them in the baggage room and didn’t distribute them with the other convention materials when the writers registered,” she said.

Writers Had Voracious Appetites

The pair handed out as many of the flyers and fact sheets in person as they could. But not one booking resulted from their efforts.

Griffith hoped for better results when she invited Southern California-area mystery writers to a Los Angeles Press Club wine-and-cheese party.

“One-hundred-and-ten of them showed up,” she said. “I’d thought they would be my prime candidates. But uh-uh. It was a fizzle. They all had voracious appetites--they had the nerve to cart off the cheese that they didn’t eat on the spot, all 85 pounds of it.

“But no one signed up for the cruise. Not even the writer who won the $100 certificate we gave away as a prize. I think mystery writers are all poverty-stricken.”

Novelist to Write Script

Along the way, however, the Griffiths were introduced to Encino novelist John Ball, a successful author whose work includes the acclaimed “In the Heat of the Night.” He agreed to write the script for the shipboard crime in exchange for a free cabin during the voyage.

Ball also arranged for several of his friends to help out on the cruise. They include British mystery writer Elliston Trevor, author of the “Quiller Memorandum,” James Robenson, a Pasadena Police Department commander who is the role model for the Ball character Virgil Tibbs, and author Gerald Petievich, an ex-undercover agent who wrote “To Live and Die in Los Angeles.”

Robenson and the others will interrogate the mystery cruise passengers. Ball said he will use their findings to fill out the script’s “pretty-tight outline” as the ship is sailing.

Ball said he decided to join the cruise after being a passenger about 1 1/2 years ago on a weekend “mystery train” trip to San Francisco. The rail excursion was staged by the Laguna Beach-based Pickwick Club and resembled the movie, “Murder on the Orient Express.” Mystery buffs participated in solving crimes depicted by costumed actors during the train ride.

Plot a Secret

“A ship is certainly better than a train for something like this,” Ball said. “How many times can you restage a crime scene so that everybody in a narrow rail car can see it?”

Ball said the mystery cruise plot is being kept a secret, and the solution will be locked up in the ship captain’s safe until the final day of the voyage. Clues will be revealed on the ship’s closed-circuit television system and in its newspaper. Ball revealed, however, that the crime will involve spies and the theft of stealth-bomber secrets.

“One of the things there won’t be is a murder,” Ball said. “You can drag out a body for a short mystery trip. But you can’t dispose of anyone for seven days.”

Griffiths and Ball said the sleuthing will be restricted to about two hours a day so as not to interfere with other planned shipboard and shore-leave activities. “It would wear much too thin if it went on for 24 hours a day,” Ball said.

Inn Popularized Idea

The shipboard setting is likely to be watched closely by others who stage their own types of participatory theater.

Officials at the Mohonk Mountain House, a Victorian inn in New Paltz, N.Y., that is credited with popularizing mock crime-solving sessions by starting “Mohonk Mystery Weekends” nine years ago, used a sea-cruise murder theme for last year’s event.

“We turned the mansion into the ‘S.S. Mohonka,’ ” said Faire Hart, the inn’s public relations director. The nautical script for the event was written by mystery author Donald Westlake.

Hart said the annual March mystery weekends were started to help fill the 150-room inn “when there isn’t much snow on the ground but the weather is still dreary.” Priced from $300 to $700, depending upon accommodations, it is a yearly sellout. Phone reservations are taken for the event only one day: the first Thursday in December, starting at 9 a.m., she said.

Another in the Business

Sean Wright, a Hollywood writer and actor, runs a company called The Plot Thickens. He has also conducted mystery train excursions to San Francisco, Santa Barbara and the Grand Canyon. Wright said he hopes to stage a sea-voyage mystery.

He said he went so far as to make preliminary plans for a three-day Mexican cruise that was scheduled to be held last month on the S.S. Azure Seas. The Western Cruise Lines ship is based in San Pedro and makes weekly short trips into Mexican waters.

Wright said he was forced to at least temporarily drop the idea when only one person booked passage for his own mystery voyage.

But he said he is anxious to try again. “I think a shorter cruise would work out better,” he said. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t see how John Ball can make it interesting for seven days.”

Scared Off by Price

Wright speculates mystery fans were scared off from his cruise by the $750 price he was planning to charge. Regular Azure Seas rates are as little as $395 per person. The extra, he said, was to have paid his troupe of actors and the outing’s administrative costs.

Griffiths, meantime, is banking on earning a profit from commissions she is receiving for booking mystery cruisers on the Tropicale. Besides the standard 10% travel-agent commission for each booking, she will receive another 10% from group bookings plus an extra 5% for advertising from Carnival Cruise Lines. The bookings are handled through Griffiths’ G.I.T. Travel, although mystery cruise participants will pay the same fare as regular passengers.

Carnival Lines’ Musiel acknowledged that “there hasn’t been a whole bunch committed to advertising” for the mystery cruise.

Long-Range Plans

“We’ll have 50 people if we’re lucky,” she predicted. “But we hope it will be successful so we can do it on a large scale in the future. We’re excited. We’ve had square dancers and cloggers and the Shriners, but no other groups like this one.

“We’ll obviously let the other passengers who aren’t involved with the mystery know what’s going on so they don’t go absolutely nuts if they see a body with catsup on it.”

The sea-going sleuths will have full run of the ship, except for the engine room and the bridge, she said. “The last thing we want is for the ship heading for Sidney, Australia, or some place like that.”

If this cruise is a success, Griffiths said, she and her husband are already planning their next mystery trip. Its destination will be the Bermuda Triangle.