Originally posted June 17, 2024. Somehow it had never occurred to me, in the hundreds—maybe thousands—of hours I’d spent bingeing stories just like this, that every whodunit really involved a double murder: of the victim, but also of some intangible but deeply vital part of the killer’s own humanity. Ah, murder mystery games. So much more fun in theory than they are in practice. I won’t deny daydreaming about blowing $1000 to deduct in costume at an isolated ski lodge, even though my experiences with the budget version range from the group coming up with an elaborate spy theory while missing the cigarette clue to “Oops, we all accidentally read our entire character sheets and now have to pretend we don’t know who did it.” They end up being more of a conversation piece for buzzed socializing than an exercise in narrative. On the bright side, you rarely have to wonder if one of your guests is an actual murderer, like the unfortunate protagonist of All Dressed Up by Jil...

Originally posted June 5, 2024. “I’m not seriously a suspect?” Juliette said. “I mean, everyone’s a suspect.” “Are you?” “Well… no.” “Why not?” “I’m the narrator.” My conclusion about Benjamin Stevenson’s previous novel, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone , was that it was best treated as a sort of practical joke on the reader. While the title might make you think it’s something like Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), an elaborate tale of family treachery and literal backstabbing, the actual story was a fairly standard mystery where most of your attention is on deciphering the truth about what you’ve been told you will be told. A self-proclaimed “reliable narrator,” Ernest Cunningham promises to be upfront and honest about the truth, then proceeds to bamboozle you with exact-words trickery in the manner of a particularly unfair cryptic crossword. So while I wasn’t sure what to expect of Stevenson’s follow-up, Everyone on This Train is a Suspect , I went in with ...

Originally posted May 15, 2024. People hunger for epiphany, you think, they clamor for it, but given a chance, who among us would actually recognize it? Happening across West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman at the library, I was intrigued by its promise of a metafictional murder mystery (“the only missing piece of the puzzle is you, dear reader”) that combined elements of noir and fair-play detection, and in which “everyone is a suspect, including the erratic detective”. Given that description, I wasn’t expecting a conventional solution, but unfortunately I still came away disappointed—as much as it was the initial draw, I almost wished that this hadn’t been metafiction at all. West Heart Kill is aggressively fourth-wall-breaking, but I’ll start with the in-universe plot: It’s 1976, and private investigator Adam McAnnis has joined his university friend James Blake for a Fourth of July party at an exclusive hunting club owned by the Blakes and five other wealthy f...

Originally posted May 1, 2024. Is mystery fiction anti-art? Jorge Luis Borges didn’t seem to think so: a mystery enthusiast, he encouraged translations of various European novels into Spanish. In fact, Borges’s first work in English translation was the short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine , translated by mystery novelist and editor Anthony Boucher. While that story is better-known when you think “Borges” and “mystery”, Borges also produced a volume of humorous detective stories alongside his friend and collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, writing under the pen name H. Bustos Domecq. The Don Isidro Parodi stories are an affectionate, well, parody of the genre, and a satire of cosmopolitan Buenos Ares—anti-art in a different sense. Don Isidro is a stationary consulting detective, the ratiocinating kind, who solves problems brought to him merely after having them described. In a turn that the foreword tongue-in-cheekily...