Whodunit Train Treks : Mystery Tours Reward Employees

Howard Rush had just opened his office door when a shadowy figure bopped him on the bean and rifled his briefcase.

No one at the Sparkletts Drinking Water offices in Los Angeles saw or heard anything, and Rush--a vice president of the company--said he was dazed by the blow to his head and unable to remember a thing about the incident.

The office was abuzz when several of Rush’s co-workers noticed that their boss’s face was bruised on one cheek while a lipstick smear adorned the other.

Then, as anxious employees looked on, the horror-stricken Rush discovered that Sparkletts’ top-secret water formula was missing from his briefcase.

Sound like a case for Sherlock Holmes?

Righto. Pipe in hand, a Sherlock look-alike picked that moment to waltz into the water-bottling giant’s accounting department and declare the shenanigans a mystery. He led 30 of Sparkletts’ accounting department supervisors out of the company’s headquarters, onto a double-decker bus, and off to Union Station.

There, clues began flying like pigeons at Piccadilly Circus.

Whodunit Train Treks

Behind all this hoopla is Pickwick Productions of Laguna Beach, a group of professional mystery makers who hope to make it big coaxing corporations to compensate key workers with dramatic, whodunit train treks. The Sparkletts caper was one such event, staged on one of the 3-year-old company’s recent California Mystery Train tours.

Unlike most of its competing mystery production companies--which appeal strictly to mystery buffs--Pickwick hopes to railroad its mystery-on-wheels into the well-heeled heart of the nation’s business community.

The company, which hopes to turn its first profit this year, is offering its riddle-ridden train treks as an alternative to rewarding top executives, secretaries or sales people with trips to Las Vegas and Hawaii.

Beyond that, the mystery trips are being promoted as a way to give employees a chance to have fun while working together on projects outside the office.,

And senior executives who have taken part in Pickwick’s Holmesian productions say an added benefit is that the trips can clue them in to how their managers manage when the pinstripes are off but the pressure still is on.

On the Sparkletts jaunt, for example, the accounting department managers were reluctant to violate the normal corporate pecking order. Even though Rush was actively playing a role in the mystery, none of his subordinates gathered the gumption to search the boss’s briefcase for clues.

Sherlock finally had to open the bag himself, spilling out:

An earring . . . a broken finger nail . . . a key numbered 1102.

The Sparkletts managers followed the detective to the train station lockers where, as the master of mystery had deduced, the key opened locker No. 1102.

But what to make of the Mexican newspaper found inside? Or of the single earring or the shred of painted fingernail found in Rush’s briefcase?

None of the apprentice sleuths had a clue, so Sherlock led the group to a departing train, whisked them on board, and vowed that the mystery would be solved by day’s end.

Lately, Sherlock has been taking lots of executives on train rides.

A few weeks before he accompanied the Sparkletts employees to San Juan Capistrano to try and solve their particular mystery, he escorted a group of Los Angeles advertising executives from Reeds, Farris, Lewis & Maisel to San Diego. The task? To try to figure out who kidnaped their boss, and why.

And before that, he took managers from Lend Lease Trucking, a Minneapolis division of National Car Rental System Inc., to Tijuana to catch the culprits who were stealing the company’s trucks.

The trips, featuring mystery scenarios written to order for businesses, all leave from Union Station in Los Angeles. Actors on the one-day tours to near-by San Juan Capistrano or on three-day treks as far as San Francisco spin detailed mystery yarns and try to keep their audiences participating actively in the hunt for a solution to the puzzler.

Mystery Business Growing

“We can build a mystery around anything a company wants,” said Richard Doherr, president and chief executive of Pickwick’s Mystery Train. If a company is setting new sales goals or about to manufacture a new product, the Mystery Train’s producers can weave a drama to fit.

“There’s a big difference between showing your sales team a slide show and putting them on a train” and letting them discover the message for themselves by solving a planned mystery, Doherr said.

Just a few years ago, mystery was relegated to books, board games and income tax forms. But it has suddenly evolved into a multimillion-dollar industry that has spawned hundreds of mystery clubs and annual conferences and contests for mystery buffs. To appeal to this growing group of consumers, entrepreneurs have created everything from mystery weekends at posh hotels to international mystery cruises.

But in trying to corner the corporate market, the Mystery Train is adding a new dimension to the rash of nationwide mystery mania. If it can get employees at Fortune 500 companies intrigued by dramatic intrigue, a whole new mystery market could be unveiled.

One Texas insurance company recently sent 50 top salesman on a weeklong mystery tour of London. “You can only give these guys so many trips to Hawaii before they get bored with it,” said Gary Rundquist, president of Intercontinental Travel Systems, a San Diego company that books worldwide mystery jaunts at prices, per-participant, of $1,600 and up.

Jack Spring, executive vice president at Minneapolis-based National Car Rental, said his mystery train trip to San Diego gave him an opportunity to mingle with more than 200 managers from the company’s Lend Lease Trucking division. The mystery was set in the 1940s and the managers’ task was to find out where the company’s trucks were disappearing to, and why.

The answer was that a competitor was stealing Lend Lease’s trucks in order to expand its fleet; finding the answer “gave me a chance to see how some of my managers think on their feet,” Spring said.

Sparkletts’ 30 supervisors spent plenty of time on their feet. At the train’s first stop, they foiled the plans of two men in Amtrak uniforms who attempted to kidnap one supervisor.

Once arrived in San Juan Capistrano, the group covered the downtown area, snatching clues from the fountain at the mission and from the bodice of a barmaid at a local saloon.

In all, Sparkletts spent nearly $4,000 to send its supervisors out snooping for the day.

That is the kind of business that could put Mystery Train solidly on track. Currently, after operating on a shoestring for nearly three years, the company has just five full-time workers and a handful of part-time actors.

Pickwick’s original marketing plan was to lure mystery aficionados for twice-monthly trips. That audience, however, is limited not only by number but by cost. One-day trips begin at $88 per person and three-day adventures with overnight hotel stays cost upward of $1,500, Doherr said.

Partly because of such steep price tags for its Mystery Train tours, Pickwick lost money during 1983, its first year of operation. It broke even last year and, with new corporate business, the privately owned company expects to make $750,000 this year on sales of more than $2 million, Doherr said.

Pickwick was created by Doherr three years ago as a grandiose corporate party-planning firm. It orchestrated parties that used Dickens’ London as a theme.

As public interest in his company mounted, Doherr began arranging mystery outings that took place aboard double-decker buses. The train trips soon followed.

But another “Murder on the Orient Express” the company is not. A Mother’s Day trek to San Juan Capistrano backfired last month when Amtrack forgot to hitch Pickwick’s private coach to the train and some tour-goers were left stranded. And despite the best-laid plans of the mystery writers, clues often are never found, forcing Doherr to hastily rewrite the solution to more than one mystery tour. The Sparkletts’ supervisors, for instance, never came close to solving their mystery. Many were just happy to spend their day away from the office, sightseeing instead of clue-seeking.

So in the end, it was Sherlock who explained that Rush had faked the robbery to cover up his own crimes.

As Sherlock wove the clues together, it became clear that Rush had sold Sparkletts’ secret formula to a competitor and intended to use his ill-gotten gains to retire to Mexico with his girlfriend--whose earring and broken fingernail were found in his briefcase and whose lipstick had smudged his cheek. The Mexican newspapers found in the train station locker were from the town to which the two hoped to escape.

Although the Sparkletts managers didn’t solve that one on their own, they were left with one more mystery to unravel as the day ended: How to beat the L.A. traffic jam when the train arrived back home at rush hour.