(Slight Spoiler Alert) Prologue: Why I fell for Agatha Christie and Keigo Higashino's whodunits
Avid mystery novel readers: you are in the right place.
I had a childhood fascination with brain teasers and mystery novels. When I was ten years old, I solved IQ questions together with my mom, and later when I grew up, I read crime mystery novels together with her, trying to beat her on guessing the real murderer.
If I have the power to survey every individual in the United States, I want to figure out one thing: which occupation has the most whodunit fans. For sure, not every investigative reporter is a wannabe detective (like Billy Jensen, a crime reporter-turned detective). Still, I imagine investigative reporters to be one of the top tiers of crime mystery novel lovers, solely because of their strong curiosity and perseverance.
That is why I created this newsletter to share my (and other's) thoughts on whodunits. That said, Puzzler is not just a book reviewer. It is a combination of both real-world and fictional crime riddles.
To avid mystery novel readers: you are in the right place. If you are not really into those novels, you are in an even better place - a lot of the things I write about here will involve real-world puzzles. For instance, I plan to write about the new technologies implemented in forensic science, or a comparison of mystery novels/TV series and crimes in reality. Please be aware - there will be spoiler alerts, although I promise I will not be talking about novel plots in every single issue of Puzzler.
In the first edition of Puzzler, I am opening a conversation about what is a whodunit, what readers expect from it, and the differences in mystery writings between different countries.
Let's start with whodunit - what is a whodunit, exactly? According to Merriam Webster, the word "whodunit" was first used by book reviewer Donald Gordon when commenting on a novel in 1930, and became overly popular by 1939. Colloquially, it is an elision of "Who [has] done it," which accurately represents the essential part and ultimate goal of solving a mystery: to identify the real murder(s). A mystery is the gradual unraveling of an intellectual puzzle and the heroic discovery of the "Whodunit." Reader satisfaction is derived from guessing the real murderer before the detective does or, failing that, enjoying the mystery's unraveling and going back to ponder over the subtle clues the author sprinkled in along the way.
The majority of the whodunits involve four parties - a sleuth, a criminal, a decedent, and the rest of the people who consist of witnesses and suspects. Some classic novels bravely break that four-party rule - for example, Agatha Christie's famous "And Then There Were None," "Murder on the Orient Express," and "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd." Christie played with the rules of whodunit, making her already unconventional mystery novels even more unexpected.
Agatha Christie
Compared to other literary genres such as fable, political fiction and speculative fiction, whodunits are less recognized as depiction of the society because its plots attract the majority of readers' attention, barely leaving any room for analysis of the ancillary parts that compose the story. However, I particularly love some Japanese whodunits just because they not only deliver a fully-developed mystery but also illustrate the entanglement of human nature and society in the most extreme (somewhat dramatic but also realistic) form. For example, one of my favorite Japanese authors is Keigo Higashino, who wrote the mystery novel "The Devotion of Suspect X." His work left me feeling helpless, weak and in agony for the murderer. Keigo's work is far beyond the plot-driven whodunit. It is a masterpiece of human observation. Keigo is using crime as a magnifier for the desire resting deep in every human's heart, like you and me.
(photo by AZ Quotes. Quote from Keigo’s book “The Devotion of Suspect X,” which was made into both Japanese and Chinese films.
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed the first issue of Puzzler. Meanwhile, I would like to get to know my readers. Please let me know your thoughts and what you are interested in by leaving a comment or participating in the discussion thread that follows this article.
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