Welcome to a new Golden Age of the 'whodunit'

Mist swirls around a rambling country house. Inside, the family are gathered to celebrate the 85th birthday of a bestselling mystery novelist. But that night, after the party, the patriarch dies, seemingly by his own hand. Enter a master detective who gathers the family together in a library and interrogates them, only to discover they each have a motive for murder. ‘I suspect foul play,’ says the sleuth, ‘and I have eliminated no suspects.’

This may sound like the set-up of an Agatha Christie novel, written in the Twenties or Thirties, but it is, in fact, the beginning of Rian Johnson’s brilliant new film, Knives Out. The director of Looper and Star Wars: The Last Jedi has turned his hand to that crusty old genre, the whodunit, which many had believed had gone the way of candlestick telephones.

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With an all-star cast – including Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Don Johnson and Toni Collette – Knives Out is set in contemporary America and gave the writer-director the opportunity to play with a form he had loved since childhood.

So, what is it about the whodunit that is not just so appealing – but also right for our modern times? ‘I grew up reading Agatha Christie and there’s something about the whodunit which is deeply, deeply satisfying,’ he says.

‘I think it comes down to the shape of the whodunit. A crime is committed, which throws the world into moral chaos. But a detective figure, through reason and logic, solves the crime and restores the world to a state of order. That sense of comfort is incredibly reassuring in the world we live in.’

The basic narrative arc of the whodunit – the unmasking of a villain – dates back as far as storytelling itself, with early examples such as the story of Susanna and the Elders in the Bible and The Three Apples in One Thousand and One Nights. As Dorothy L Sayers, famous for her crime novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, said of the whodunit, ‘the art of self-tormenting is an ancient one, with a long and honourable literary tradition’.

Central to its allure is a cat-and-mouse game between its creator and consumer. ‘The writer is essentially saying to the reader: one of these characters is a criminal and I defy you to find out who it is,’ says John Curran, Agatha Christie scholar and author of the recently published The Hooded Gunman: An Illustrated History of Collins Crime Club. ‘Every newspaper carries a crossword puzzle, quizzes are amazingly popular and people like cudgelling their brains, they like to be tricked in increasingly elaborate ways.’

The modern whodunit can be traced back to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), with the introduction of detective C Auguste Dupin, who solves the brutal murders of two women by means of ‘ratiocination’. Dupin, who reappears in Poe’s stories The Mystery of Marie Roget and The Purloined Letter, later inspired fictional sleuths such as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Christie’s Hercule Poirot. Although Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) is often cited as the first detective novel in English, now scholars believe that the accolade should go to Charles Felix’s The Notting Hill Mystery, first published in serial form in 1862 to 1863. However, it wasn’t until the early 20th century, in the ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction, that the form really flourished.

‘I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Golden Age of crime fiction dates back to the same time as the rise of the crossword puzzle,’ says Curran. The year 1913 saw the publication of what is generally considered to be the first crossword puzzle in English and also the release of E C Bentley’s novel Trent’s Last Case, judged by Christie to be ‘one of the three best detective stories ever written’. During the course of a career that spanned more than 50 years, Christie experimented with the whodunit form. Indeed, when her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published in 1926, she was accused of breaking one of the seminal ‘rules’ of detective fiction (spoiler): don’t make your narrator the murderer. That novel – and her 10-day disappearance the same year – turned her into a celebrity.

‘I remember reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd as a young boy and it blew my mind,’ says Johnson. ‘If that was published today you’d think it was spinning the genre on its head.’

Knives Out taps into the whodunit’s love affair with itself, the way in which it has often referenced its own tropes and traditions. ‘Even the earliest whodunits were talking about the form and cliches of whodunits,’ says Johnson. ‘It’s shocking how quickly the genre became meta. This meta-fictionality is built into the genre.’

In Christie’s Miss Marple mystery The Body in the Library (1942), a young fan of detective fiction, Peter Carmody, reveals that he has the autographs of a number of whodunit writers, including John Dickson Carr, Sayers, and even Christie herself.

With Christie’s death in 1976, there was an assumption that the whodunit would die with her. That, or it was somehow irrelevant, a subject for pastiche and parody. ‘I think it is a silly way of teasing people, ‘who-done-it’,’ said Patricia Highsmith, author of the Ripley novels, in 1982. Instead, the ‘whydunnit’ – the exploration of the darker aspects of human behaviour, as written by authors such as Highsmith and Barbara Vine – became more in vogue.

However, the past few years have seen the resurgence of the form. After the success of Sarah Phelps’s BBC One adaptation of Christie’s 1939 novel And Then There Were None, we’ve seen small-screen versions of Witness for the Prosecution, Ordeal by Innocence and The ABC Murders. Next year, we’re promised Phelps’s take on Christie’s The Pale Horse, together with Kenneth Branagh’s feature film adaptation of Death on the Nile. In June, Netflix revealed that Murder Mystery, starring Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler, was streamed by nearly 31 million accounts over the course of its opening weekend alone.

Bestselling authors such as Ruth Ware and Lucy Foley have written gripping contemporary whodunits set on board boutique cruise ships and in isolated hunting lodges in the Scottish Highlands.

Stuart Turton has played with the form in The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which won the 2018 Costa First Novel Award. In my own crime novels – A Talent for Murder, A Different Kind of Evil and Death in a Desert Land – I imagine what it would be like if Agatha Christie herself turned sleuth.

So are we living through another golden age of the whodunit? Johnson certainly thinks so. ‘We tend to see whodunits as period pieces, somehow encased in amber, but this needn’t be so,’ he says. ‘Christie was writing very much in her time, using characters that she took straight from society. That’s what I hope I’ve done in Knives Out.

‘This doesn’t mean it has to be Colonel Mustard with a cell phone. The whodunit is as relevant as it ever was – the form is inherently entertaining, it’s as comfortable as an old shoe. But you can use it to tell a story that resonates today.’

A Talent for Murder, A Different Kind of Evil and Death in a Desert Land are all published by Simon & Schuster.

The Daily Telegraph