The Eighth Detective

by Alex Pavesi

“the first ingredient is a group of suspects—the characters that may, or may not, have been responsible for the killing.

Two suspects can give you the same essential structure as any other number.”

“In even the most innocent scenes, there is darkness to be found at the corners,” he said, “from the way the light falls on the frame.”

“The second ingredient of a murder mystery is a victim or group of victims. Those characters that have been killed in unknown circumstances.”

“Because theories are never facts. And each one must be confirmed by several pieces of evidence.”

“Suspects, victims, and detectives. The first three ingredients of a murder mystery.”

The only condition is that the killer, or killers, must be drawn from the group of suspects. In mathematics we’d call it a subset and say that the killers must be a subset of the suspects,

What it means is that everyone who is revealed as one of the killers must previously have been one of the suspects.”

“We say that a story qualifies as a murder mystery if the reader can sort its characters into these four sets and—crucially—the set of killers is identified in the text after the other three sets have been completed. That sentence is what joins the world of mathematics to the imprecise world of literature.”

The craft, then, is in the misdirection: in picking the solution that in some ways seems the most unsuitable to the story you’ve written but in other ways fits perfectly.”