The former ad man who brought this region his Murder Café dinner theater has put his favorite tales from decades of performances into a book.

Frank Marquette of Rosendale operates Murder Café out of various local venues in Ulster and Dutchess counties and beyond. For more than 25 years, with his wife and partner Kristen and, in earlier times with daughters Irene, Katherine and Vicki, the Marquettes organized and staged fully scripted original plays with content customized for clients and audiences alike.

During a recent sit-down with Kingston Wire, Marquette explained that he has come to expect the unexpected when putting on shows designed to travel. When recently prompted by eldest daughter Irene Marquette to gather a brief history of their time in entertainment, Frank relayed tales of their exploits to friends — and the feedback encouraged him. “As I started telling stories, people were telling me, ‘You’ve got a book here,’” Marquette said. Not just for Murder Café fans, Marquette said the book would make an excellent gift for anyone interested in acting, staging performances or folks who just want a peek behind the curtain of an operation that has run successfully for more than two decades.

The book, “The True Story of Murder Café: How One Family’s Plunge into Mystery Dinner Theater Made the World a Better Place” releases Sunday, Dec. 1 at various local bookstores, with planned launch parties with appearances and signings coming in January. If you’ve ever wondered whodunit and how, this might be the book for you.

Originally from New York City but raised in Kingston, Marquette attended city schools starting at 7 years old. He is a KHS graduate who also attended Dutchess Community College and the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he developed skills in advertising art and graphics design that he relies on even today.

Back in the 1970s, Kristen Marquette met Frank while developing marketing materials for a salon company she managed that operated out of the Sears store that used to be in the Kingston Plaza. “We went on a date. We had a very nice date, and then I didn’t hear from him for quite a while,” Kristen said.

When she next saw Frank, she said they coincidentally happened to both be at a Kingston disco club, watching a disco dance contest. She spotted him and approached, and said the following: “It’s been a while” then later, “People have to eat.”

Kristen said more dates would follow. In 1980, Marquette married Kristen in Kingston. They soon welcomed their first daughter Irene, and in 1982 the family decided to move to New Mexico. “It was a case of go west young people,” Marquette said, adding that there were plenty of professional opportunities where he landed. Kristen, already with strong local ties, said they were looking for a fresh start and she had relatives out west. The family then grew in size, adding Katherine (now Purtell) and Vicki Marquette shortly thereafter.

Marquette spent more than 15 years working in advertising for newspapers, relying on his graphics design background to assist with ad layout. He said he was professionally invigorated but needing another outlet to grow personally. Kristen said Frank pursued acting consistently since he was 17, so when Frank saw a casting call for a play in1993 Marquette said Kristen gave him her blessing.

“I wanted to do something creative, and my wife was encouraging me to audition for a play. That’s how this whole thing started,” he said.

By 1997, the Marquettes left the Albuquerque area for Las Vegas. Marquette said they were chasing professional opportunities, but he was hoping for chances to act as well. Over the next ten years Marquette worked at the Las Vegas Review-Journal as the major accounts manager. Professionally comfortable, Marquette said the call to branch out into performance arts took hold. But he said he wasn’t finding exactly what he wanted.

“Certain actors have a snobbish view of dinner theater,” Marquette said, noting that he found the free food angle a good selling point. He said that other dinner theaters in Vegas were unscripted and messy, not to his liking. By the time the girls were around middle school age, in 1998 he chose to start Murder Café — and he took all the Marquettes with him.

Dinner theater comes naturally to Frank, Kristen said. While a traditional performance might only require memorizing a script, with dinner theater some crowd interaction occurs organically. “He’s very quick on his feet,” Kristen said.

Yet, acting skill alone wasn’t quite the same as running a company, Marquette said. “We were naïve. We just dove headfirst into it.”

Marquette said Las Vegas had plenty of good actors available, and Murder Café was well received once it was up and running. The Marquettes and their group of professionals were working resorts and corporate parties at the time, but the start was very raw. He said his family often had to cobble together props and costumes on the fly and he gave his wife Kristen, who brings decades of professional makeup and hair stylist experience, a lot of credit for their success. Kristen said the whole house was dedicated to putting on a show, with costumes sewn together in the living room while rehearsals took place in the dining room.

“It was adventurous, it was exciting,” Marquette added.

Marquette’s daughters took active roles. “This was a family business,” Marquette said, explaining that Vicki acted, Irene acted and wrote scripts while Katherine worked the sound system. He said it was more than just a job for them, noting that two of his daughters found partners there.

“I couldn’t have done it without them,” Marquette added.

Even these days, Kristen said, Murder Café is always on their minds. She said they get ideas constantly, from road signs or interesting names, or just during quiet moments when a day’s events wind down. “The truth of the matter is, Murder Café is our fourth child,” she added.

Marquette said that their daughter Irene took her family business experience down a more traditional Hollywood path. While she pitched her family’s history to a producer for a potential show, Marquette said he started taking notes that could translate into episodes or other content. Those notes, he said, would evolve into the Murder Café book.

By 2009, Marquette said it was time for his family to return to the Hudson Valley. Faced with a news industry transition from print to digital formats, paired with a daughter attending Vassar and a mother who wished to return to the area, the Marquettes transplanted to Rosendale. He said he was eager to introduce Murder Café to this area, but the Hudson Valley is decidedly unlike Las Vegas.

Marquette said he knew immediately there would be a lot of legwork to sell the brand, in part because there wasn’t anything really like it being offered. “There wouldn’t be an immediate return,” Marquette observed, adding that to get recognition the group he reformed here would put on productions in libraries and community centers for free.

“I said yes to every single venue I was asked to perform in,” Marquette added. Kristen confirmed that business approach, stating their willingness to push boundaries kept them from ever telling a would-be customer a simple “no.” She said whenever they were asked if they had ever produced a particular story, if they hadn’t her answer was always “not yet.”

While Marquette said that the local acting talent pool has expanded quite a bit in the last five to 10 years, Kristen said even when they started locally there were folks interested in performing. “A bunch of people came out of the woodwork,” she explained.

Marquette said it didn’t take long for Murder Café to catch on here, and he credits his willingness to work with venues on production matters and advertising as a key to his early regional growth.

That growth has been sustained, he said, noting that these days he’s been putting on more than 60 shows a year. He now employs an assistant, four directors, and when there are casting calls for seven parts, he almost always sees more than 25 applicants. Having stepped back some from acting, Marquette said the goal now is to expand past comfort zones by honoring new requests from different sources. “I’ve learned to delegate,” Marquette said. “I can expand now by delegating.”

The move offstage felt natural with so many years of experience, Marquette said. “I feel great about it,” he added, stating he enjoys being able to give other likeminded creative types opportunities to act and be part of the production.

Murder Café has been employed by various charitable organizations, and through discounted rates and other means Marquette estimates Murder Café has helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for causes like ARC, the American Red Cross, United Cerebral Palsy and the American Cancer Society.

Marquette also operates Theatre On The Road, which encompasses all his other creative outlets outside of Murder Café. Through Theater On The Road, he offers history lectures on subjects like the bootleg era and ghost stories, more traditional theatrical productions like “Dracula” or “A Christmas Carol,” living history events available at different local historic sites and cemetery tours.

And while “The True Story of Murder Café” might tell the tales of what it’s truly like to put on theater performances here and out west, Marquette said it’s also a story about having a vision, and how by choosing to pursue it, “it can lead to something wonderful that impacts a lot of people.”

Kristen would add that neither of them have any plans to stop, in part because it’s their obsession. “It’s always changing,” she said. “It doesn’t have a chance to get dull.”

Booking for Theatre On The Road runs through theaterontheroad@gmail.com. Murder Café can be reached at murdercafe.ny@gmail.com. For more information or to preorder the book, see www.murdercafe.net.