February 9, 2025

Big dumb murder mystery idiot

I was looking at everyone's faces when I said that and I learned nothing

One thing about me is that I love a murder mystery but another, major thing about me is that I’m actually so dumb and have never in my life accurately guessed the killer in a whodunnit novel. I see all the breadcrumbs the author has lovingly cast into my path, I note them, and then I cannot make a single leap of logic associated with said crumb. This has done nothing to dampen my affection for the genre.

Benjamin Stevenson’s writing is basically a Jigsaw-style trap for me for this exact reason. He’s a huge student of Golden Age crime and because of that he literally constructs his mysteries as love letters to the format, complete with telling you he’s doing it and voicing a commitment to following the rules and even sometimes telling you which clues are especially important or how many lines of dialogue the killer will have by the end and fucking guess what Ben you’re SMARTER THAN ME. I STILL DON’T GET IT. Anyway I had a great time following along Everybody in my Family Has Killed Someone like a big dumb idiot.

Ignore the fact that it takes place in a fantasy world where the sea wall is beset by a Leviathan Threat and all their technology is plants and The Tainted Cup is basically a Victorian detective novel. Three quarters of the way through there’s some really weird politics about how regulation is the real murderer (?) but apart from that I had a great time following the protagonist, who’s basically a plant cyborg with perfect memory, as he wanders through opulent mansions and stumbles through aristocratic tensions and, again, I just had no idea where they were going with this.

I’ve tried a lot of “cozy murder mysteries” because I don’t want to accidentally read about someone getting really grossly murdered but it turns out a lot of those are a bust because I also don’t love “people drinking cocoa for 80 consecutive pages, to the extent that this is actually what the book is functionally about” or the word “spoopy” so The Golden Spoon is a really perfectly threaded needle that isn’t so stressful but is also not annoyingly cloying. Six contestants with Secrets of their Own wandering around a castle and a murder victim who definitely deserved it — this book moves but will not give you a heart attack. It’s kind of what I expected from Patricia Wants to Cuddle, which is also a spoof on a reality format that fucking did very much scare me a lot. Let me be clear, it was very good but I can’t express enough the amount of viscera in that book that I did not expect (I was expecting none).

(I’m chanting) Hag’s Nook Hag’s Nook Hag’s Nook! This is just a little 1930s mystery about a typical British family who happen to have the terrifying ruins of a prison tower and body pit mouldering in their backyard and a hereditary tendency to die of broken necks. When the latest heir has to complete the rite of spending the night of his 25th birthday in the tower you will simply never guess what happens to him. Can you guess? I didn’t!

Honestly the bit of Agatha Christie’s ABC Murders is so good. It’s not even my favorite of her mysteries but it is the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. People with alliterative names keep getting murdered (first Alice Ascher in Andover, then Betty Barnard in Bexhill, you get where I’m going with this, right?) My favorite thing about this book is the one person who definitely didn’t commit the murder. The action keeps cutting to this weird, loner traveling stocking salesman named Alexander Bonaparte Cust who is absolutely being set up and it almost works because of his offputting nature and his crazy contrived name and his tendency to pass out all the time. He’s one of my favorite characters of all time because honestly what are the odds that would happen to you. There’s a part in Steve Martin’s “The Jerk” where Martin’s character is feeling really good about life and then they hard cut to M. Emmet Walsh holding a sniper rifle picking his name at random out of a phone book. This scene was so funny to me that I don’t think I even laughed I think I just stopped breathing for a bit. Anyway the concept of this guy with a stupid name and weak constitution being set up for a bunch of campy overthemed murders for no reason is similarly extremely funny to me.

Talk about feeling taunted; A Murder is Announced has all the neighbors assembling at one house because they’re told there’s definitely going to be a murder there and then everyone is stunned when a murder happens. At least in this one I get to be in league with a bunch of aristocratic, scone-stuffed idiots when I completely fail to understand what’s going on. Plus an implied lesbian couple???? Agatha you spoil me.

I could genuinely just keep listing Agatha Christies in here. Her ability to continuously rework a rather homogenous selection of characters and settings into an endless labyrinth of faulty assumptions, punctured timelines, and a parade of secret twins means I have gotten no better at getting to the bottom of them no matter how much I read. Anyway, I like the dreamlike nature of Sleeping Murder, where a newlywed buying a house in a remote coastal town has an unshakeable feeling she’s been there before and keeps getting glimpses of memories that make no sense including, and I think about this all the time, a monkey’s outstretched paw. You’re a little compelled by this, right? You can admit it. The monkey thing is weird. Are you admitting it? OK good.

A little housekeeping before you go!

I have a Bookshop.org affiliate account now(!), which is where all the links above go to. I also have a storefront there that has lists for each issue of my newsletter if that helps anybody find books more easily.