Whodunit

The Cast of "Clue"

Crime and mystery stories are very popular and with good reason. A lot of people like solving a puzzle and that is what every mystery story is deep in its heart. In a mystery or crime story, be it a cosy mystery, a police procedural, or a thriller (or anything and everything in between), the author sets up a puzzle and allows the reader to try and solve it next to the detective. This is why S. S. van Dine laid down the “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” a long time ago (I actually wrote a post about that already). I’m not going to rehash my previous post here, though. No, this is a post about a specific type of mystery story known as the Whodunit.

The Whodunit sets a few very specific rules for the author to remember. It can be done in different ways and there are a lot of good ones around for reading. Personally, I’d recommend “Murder on the Orient Express” or “Evil Under The Sun” for reading and “Clue” and “Death by Murder” for watching, even though the two movies are parodies of the genre rather than simple mystery stories (“Death by Murder” more so than “Clue”). Agatha Christie produced quite some Whodunits in her time (“Death on the Nile” or “And Then There Were None” also qualify as some). Edgar Wallace did quite some as well.

What, however, are the rules?

First of all, there’s limitation. Limits in space and in suspects. Usually, the Whodunit is set in a closed-off area. An old mansion in the countryside. A train stuck in a snowdrift. A house on an island. A ship in the middle of a river or ocean. This limit also means that there is no
‘outside’ perpetrator. There is no way a killer can have come and gone. One of those around must be the one who did it. Sometimes, there is a countdown of sorts (as in “And Then There Were None”). People are being killed and the survivors need to figure out who the murderer is before they’re all dead. Bringing people together for the reading of a will is a good way to bring about such a situation.

Then there’s a lot of reasons for killing the victim (or the victims). Everyone in that place (not just guests, often also personnel or inhabitants) has at least one reason to wish the murdered person ill. The detective might even not be above suspicion themselves. The Whodunit is a crime genre which works well with all kinds of possible detectives (professional, semi-professional, or amateur), because the locked-off premises give a good reason why the police can’t or won’t arrive there any time soon.

If you look at “Murder on the Orient Express,” probably the most prominent entry on my list, you will find all of this: the train is stuck in the middle of nowhere in a snow drift. Police can’t come there, no murderer can have gotten away unnoticed. The murderer must still be in the train. Because there was no access to the first-class carriage, the murderer must be one of those who have slept there. That gives Poirot, who is on the train by coincidence, a good reason to start investigating (but as a member of police turned private investigator, he counts as a professional detective). He works his way through the other guests, untangling a plan which was very new and unusual when the book was originally written (today, everyone knows the ‘all of them did it’ variety, which is why Randall Garrett didn’t use it for his version, “The Napoli Express”). One of the three solutions of “Clue” actually is a similar ‘you all did it’ thing.

If we stay with Christie and look at one of my personal favourites, “Evil Under The Sun,” we see a different setting, but a limited one as well. Here, we have a hotel on an island which is only cut off from the mainland at high tide. At the time at which the murder happened, nobody could just have come to the hotel, so outside perpetrators are out. But everyone else seems to have a perfect alibi. The most obvious suspects, the husband of the murdered woman and the wife of her current love affair, have solid alibis. The love affair does so as well. Everyone has, one way or other, snatched an alibi for themselves, no matter what. All people on the island who had a reason to wish Arlena Marshall ill are accounted for. Until Poirot realizes that someone played with the time of death and unravels a very sophisticated plan - which would totally have worked, if it weren’t for that meddling Belgian detective.

“Clue” was written so cleverly it could in the end present three suitable solutions for the murders: everyone did one, the butler did them all, or one of the guests did all of them. In the current DVD version (which is also broadcasted sometimes), all three solutions are stuck together at the end, but originally, every movie theatre was given one at random. Here we have six blackmail victims being invited to a dinner with, as it turns out, the man who blackmails them. What was meant to turn the tables on the blackmailer, turns into a free-for-all where not only the blackmailer himself perishes, but also five people who helped him gain the information he needed. Six weapons were given to the guests, each of them kills one of the victims. Everyone could have gotten them from where they were hidden. Everyone was alone for a bit.

“Murder by Death,” on the other hand, presents a murder with nobody around who would actually want to do it. The victim, who claims to know in advance who will kill him and how and why, has no enemies in the house. The detectives invited (the movie has more than enough of them, every type of classic sleuth is around) are at the same time the suspects and possible victims, since all of them are almost killed - as are, in addition to the victim, the maid and the butler. As with “Clue,” we have a lot of solutions presented, but none of them all that logical, to make fun of the way quite some crime authors just pull the solution out of the hat at the end, not giving fair clues to the audience beforehand. Nevertheless, “Murder by Death” is a very amusing movie with a lot of top-class actors. (The same also goes for “Clue.”)

Setting an interesting Whodunit can be a challenge, but this type of mystery story is a classic who can still hold people captive today. And there are too few being made these days, so it would be nice to get more of them again.