Emily Articulated: Whodunit

By Emily Erickson
Reader Columnist

I’m an avid fan of the “whodunit,” the often formulaic mystery centered around a single question: Who committed the crime? The audience, whether reader or viewer, joins the investigator in sifting through clues and narrowing down the perpetrator from a cast of suspicious characters, all culminating in the “big reveal,” where the disparate pieces finally click into place and form a cohesive conclusion.

These stories trace their roots back to the 1800s with Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” before peaking during the “golden age” of detective fiction with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and Agatha Christie in the 1920s and 1930s, when the genre became codified into a recognizable set of conventions.

Largely defined by its restraint, whodunits feature implied violence and gore rather than showing it. They place the emphasis on the puzzle itself instead of spectacle, making it an enduring favorite for readers seeking an engaging but comfortable experience.

The formula is familiar: There is “the crime,” almost always a murder. The suspect pool is closed, limited to a specific or isolated group of people (guests trapped on an island, passengers on a train, heirs gathered for a will reading), and each suspect possesses the classic triad of motive, means and opportunity. The story also follows “fair play” rules, meaning the audience has access to the same clues as the detective.

Writers introduce red herrings throughout — misleading clues, suspicious behavior and deceptive alibis — all designed to throw both the detective and the audience off the scent of the true culprit. And, finally, there is “the big reveal,” the ritualistic gathering of suspects in a single room where the detective explains the story’s logic and unveils the killer.

I like the confines of that formula, the way the pieces fit together in the end — mayhem transformed into order, justice delivered by confronting the guilty in front of the people they wronged. If the stories are cozy, British and populated by unlikely or amateur sleuths, I like them even more. The charm, eccentric relationships and humorous dysfunction layered on top of the mystery only make the puzzle more satisfying.

I’m far from alone in this. The resurgence of cozy crime stories and whodunits across film, television and publishing is reflected not only in their prevalence, but also in the star power attached to them — a sign that studios and publishers recognize the genre’s reliable appeal. Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building stars Selena Gomez, Martin Short and Steve Martin. The Knives Out films feature Daniel Craig, Edward Norton and sprawling ensemble casts designed to keep audiences guessing.

Off-screen and on the page, Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series has sold millions of copies worldwide, with The Bullet That Missed becoming one of the fastest-selling adult fiction hardcovers in recent years. Its success helped usher in a wave of similarly playful mysteries, including Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto and Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson.

The genre’s explosive popularity reflects a growing desire to find order in chaos. In an era defined by ambiguous real-world problems, the closed-circle mystery offers a kind of comforting “magician’s contract”: Every clue will eventually be revealed, the culprit exposed, and justice ultimately served. Perhaps that is why so many of us are drawn to these stories.

They allow us to experience the fantasy of things looking hopeless — the wrong suspect accused, the clues exhausted, the investigation led astray — only for the narrative to pivot at the last moment and restore moral clarity. In fiction, unlike in real life, wrongdoing is rarely allowed to remain unresolved. The audience is rewarded not just with a clever puzzle but with the reassurance that dysfunction can still be shaped into something understandable.

That fantasy feels particularly appealing because reality increasingly offers the opposite. We live in a world where powerful people seem able to evade consequences entirely, where the guilty move through public life with metaphorical “bloody handprints,” so confident in their untouchability that they practically wave and wink at the audience.

We are left shouting, “It’s him! He’s the culprit!” with no uncertainty about whodunit at all. The wolf beneath the sheep’s clothing. The man beneath the Scooby-Doo mask. Yet he walks away anyway, tracks only half-covered while someone else takes the fall.

So we (or at least I) return to fiction, especially on a post-election morning like this one, ending our days with puzzles that can still be solved within a few hundred pages, provided we pay close enough attention. Today, especially, I’ll be reaching for another mystery — another ending where the truth is uncovered, the guilty are confronted, and the story, somehow, still makes sense.

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.