The twist in these mystery novels: You get to solve the crime
The first book I ever read by myself as child was a mystery, and since then, I have read a mountain of them. Despite my passion for mysteries, however, I’m still terrible at guessing “whodunit.” • It’s not that I’m totally clueless at spotting red herrings. It’s just that I’d much rather focus on the characters and the story, so solving the puzzle and identifying the murderer before the big reveal just doesn’t grab me as much. • Yet the puzzle aspect of mysteries is beloved by many readers, as evidenced by a recent mini-trend of “solve-it-yourself” mysteries being published for adults. Intrigued, I set out to read five of them. (Spoiler alert: It was a highly entertaining experiment, but my ability to guess the culprit sadly remains negligible).
A Most Puzzling Murder by Bianca Marais
Set on desolate Eerie Island, this novel blends fantasy and mystery. The protagonist is Destiny Whip, a former child puzzle-solving prodigy who travels to Scruffmore Castle in search of information about her birth parents and instead finds herself in the midst of a deadly Scruffmore family power battle. To keep the murder count down, Whip — and the reader — must solve a series of puzzles. In a fascinating twist, readers can get clues by sending an email to an address provided by the author. Even so, I solved few of the puzzles, but — mercifully for me — Marais channels “Encyclopedia Brown” and provides the answers in the back of the book.
Can You Solve the Murder? by Antony Johnston
This one is billed as “an interactive crime novel.” As the reader, I was required to don the persona of an English police detective and actually create the story by deciding what evidence to gather, what clues to follow and which suspect to accuse of murdering a local businessman at a wellness retreat. The book is divided into 200 short, numbered sections: Readers start with the first section, then — depending on the choices they make — move through the book in a nonchronological order, jotting down a series of numbers and letters designed to help identify the murderer. It’s an incredibly inventive concept, and I quite enjoyed playing detective, although it took me two tries to guess the killer.
The Game Is Murder by Hazell Ward
The book is based on a 50-year-old real — and unsolved — murder case in which a nanny named Sally Gardner was killed, and the main suspect, her aristocratic boss, Lord John Verreman, disappeared before facing trial. Readers can take on the role of “The Great Detective” at an exclusive murder mystery dinner party hosted by David Verreman, who wants you to decide if his father is really guilty after hearing evidence laid out by the other guests. While this is the main thread of the book, it’s only one layer of the dizzying story presented by Ward in this tour-de-force meta mystery. There are puzzles for the reader to solve, frequent authorial intrusions, dozens of sly, knowledgeable references to detective fiction classics and unexpected twists galore.
Murder in Tinseltown by Max Nightingale
Things got even more challenging for me with Nightingale’s novel set in the glitzy world of late-1950s Hollywood. This time, I was thrust into the role of a Los Angeles homicide detective working to solve the mystery of who brutally murdered young movie star Blanche Aikerman in her luxury hotel suite. Similar to Johnston’s “Can You Solve the Murder?,” I jumped around in the book, depending on my choices and decisions. More often than not, I guessed wrong and was either killed, demoted or forced to start at the beginning again. While I’m admittedly not the ideal reader for this type of mystery, I did find it the most frustrating of all the “solve-it-yourself” books I read.
You Are the Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder by Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper
Fortunately, my final book offered the perfect antidote. This one is packaged as a police file on a particularly tricky locked-room murder. Six suspects were present when a seventh person died, but it seems none of the six could be the killer. The police are stumped and have asked a famous detective — the reader — to comb through the file and determine the culprit. The book is a blast to read, filled with drawings of crime scene photos and interviews with the suspects. At the end, there’s a gift for clueless readers like me: an envelope containing the killer’s confession.