I’ve noticed a flock of interactive, solve-it-yourself mysteries, so I thought I’d tell you about them. Note that I’m not talking about mystery puzzle books, like Murdle or Murdoku. They’re fun, but they’re logic puzzles with some mystery wrapping. The following are variations on mysteries where you play the detective.
Let’s start with a classic: Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? by Edward Packard was recently re-released. Originally published in 1981, it was the ninth book in the popular Choose Your Own Adventure series for kids.
It’s a classically styled mystery. A rich man has died, and while investigating, you can question various suspects, review the crime scene, and interact with a bumbling police detective. There are only 14 endings, but they’re well-structured, looping around and sending you through various activities as you work out who did it, helped by a girl detective.
The solution to the mystery is the same in all cases, so once you’ve solved it — or been told it’s solved — you know what happened, but different paths reveal different details.
Murder at Christmas: You Solve the Crime by G.B. Rubin has a similar idea, but for adults. (Note: the author, as Gareth Rubin, wrote the most recent Doyle-estate-authorized Sherlock Holmes novel, Holmes and Moriarty.) You are a pathologist in 1932 London, and you choose whether to help a friend of a friend in what turns into a murder, or go to a country house party where poison pen letters have been causing trouble. So there are two full cases in the volume.
Each scene takes up several pages, so you navigate by sections instead of pages. And if you get things wrong, you often end up dead… but you’re told “go back to the beginning and start again.” The period setting and atmosphere, layered over with the holiday, makes for just the right feel for fans of classic cozies, even if some of the deadly endings seemed a bit capricious.
Murder in Tinseltown: A Choose-Your-Own-Story Mystery by Max Nightingale is similar. (It doesn’t seem to have had a US release, but you know, the internet.) Only this time, it’s 1958 Hollywood and a famous actress is found dead in her hotel suite. You’re a police homicide detective who happens to be on the scene.
An interesting change in this book is that when you have a bad ending — which happens frequently, whether you’re murdered or your boss steals the case — the book sends you back to where you made the previous decision, a big help for those of us who like to make sure we’ve read through all the endings. Otherwise, I didn’t care for this one as much as the others; it didn’t feel particularly involving or authentic in setting.
(I will pause here to mention that all of these books assume you’re male. Which is odd given how many cozy mysteries are investigated and read by women.)
You Are the Detective: The Creeping Hand Murder by Maureen Johnson & Jay Cooper is very different. It’s more like a dossier. In 1934, a bunch of society people (or those associated with them) have gotten nasty notes accusing them of bad things, assembled from newspaper letters, and when they gather as ordered one night, one of them is stabbed.
Starting with newspaper articles and a case file, the book continues with maps and illustrated photographs, evidence and suspect interviews. At the back is a sealed envelope with the solution enclosed. (I assume. I haven’t solved mine yet so I haven’t opened it.) It’s all in black and white and red, and it feels very dissolute.
Can You Solve the Murder? is the book that got me onto this topic. It’s by Antony Johnston, whom I know better as a graphic novel author (The Fuse, Atomic Blonde), although he’s also written prose mysteries I’ve enjoyed (The Dog Sitter Detective series).
This volume feels more like an actual investigation. There’s been a murder at a crumbly old mansion that’s been turned into a floral-themed spa. You decide where to look and who to question, and as you move through the book, you collect “clues” (letter-number pairs such as A5, C2, etc.) that then affect where you go next. I found the scene-setting and characterization compelling. The mystery here is solved by police procedure, not dramatics, and it’s my favorite of these gamebooks, as it was the most satisfying. There’s already a sequel out, The Forest of Death.
Here’s the whole set of them, with both the UK (top row, larger size, French flaps, nicer presentation) and US (bottom row, more boring cover) editions of Can You Solve the Murder?.
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