In the early 1960s, the West German film industry discovered the horror thriller. Edgar Wallace adaptations like THE FROG WITH THE MASK (1959) and THE 1000 EYES OF DOCTOR MABUSE (1960) fueled a wave of success that dominated the coming decade of cinema. A clever horror thriller parody fit right in.

Agatha Scott (Johanna von Koczian) is a successful author of crime novels. One day, the public prosecutor, Dr. Peter Brent (Klausjürgen Wussow), calls her works "trash." Outraged, Agatha decides to play a trick on this insolent man and poses at his office as a woman involved in a murder case. He retaliates by inviting the writer to his country house to act out all the clichés of the crime novel as supposed misdeeds. The only problem is that a real mass murderer has infiltrated the charade, putting the almost tamed rebels in grave danger!

Director Dietrich Haugk (1925-2015), who would later direct many episodes of the successful West German crime series *Der Kommissar*, *Derrick*, and *Der Alte*, responds to the success of competing films, usually produced in Hamburg and Berlin, with his parody filmed at Bavaria Studios in Munich. Supporting roles are played by Elisabeth Flickenschildt as the public prosecutor's sophisticated mother, Peter Vogel as Agatha's eccentric private secretary, and Wolfgang Kieling (the famous murder victim from Alfred Hitchcock's *Torn Curtain*) as a frustrated violin virtuoso.

The film is quite entertaining, but it didn't achieve a resounding success. The film careers of Johanna von Koczian (1933-2024) and Klausjürgen Wussow (1929-2007) got off to a slow start. Johanna von Koczian is best known in German-speaking countries for her hit song "Das Bisschen Haushalt macht sich von Allein" (A Little Housework Takes Care of Itself), sung in the 1970s, which became a popular saying. Klausjürgen Wussow is primarily remembered for the successful series "Die Schwarzwaldklinik" (The Black Forest Clinic), which aired between 1985 and 1989 on the then-West German television channel ZDF.

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A glamorous crime novelist is invited to a remote country house where an escaped killer is at large.

Johanna von Koczian in Agatha, laß das Morden sein! (1960)

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Bavaria-Ateliers, Geiselgasteig, Grünwald, Bavaria, Germany

Wolfgang Kieling in Agatha, laß das Morden sein! (1960)

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Agatha, laß das Morden sein!

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