The Whodunnit Convention

I have discovered in myself in the last few years a rather odd talent – I am very good at figuring out whodunnit in certain modern TV Detective shows. For example, until I stopped watching it a while ago (because the challenge had rather gone out of it), I had 100% hit rate on the long running murder of the week BBC series Death in Paradise. I figured out the murderer in the recent ITV series Holding in the first episode of four and was proved correct in the final show.

So how do I do this? Have I missed my calling as a valued member of the police force? Well, no. Not in the slightest – at least not unless today’s detectives are solving their crimes via the art of narrative convention. I don’t choose my likely candidate by watching them intently, considering the evidence and weighing the probabilities. I make my selection generally early on in the programme, usually very shortly after the line up of suspects have been introduced. And I use very simple criteria.

Who doesn’t the writer want me to pay much attention to?

There’s always one. They’ll be a line up of flashy front and centre suspects, with prickly personal problems and some messy grudge against the suspect that is teased out in the process of the investigation. But then there’s a quieter one. They are generally helpful and co-operative, sometimes offering up some titbit to the police or detective about one of the other suspects in question. Often some minor issue is raised about them and discarded as a motive early in the process and they are left to be forgotten about until the denouement. And they are generally slightly off to one side of proceedings – a friend/spouse/relative to one of the suspects (usually one much maligned by the victim) or an assistant or carer of the victim, in a position to be helpful without seeming to be much involved. They have little purpose in events other than to lurk in the background. Narratively, they have no real reason to exist.

And that, ladies and gents, will be your murderer. Some unheralded grudge/familial link/protective instinct for another suspect will be revealed and they will turn out to be the guilty party. And it’s horrendously predictable.

Because in trying not to be obvious, the writers of these dramas make it very obvious indeed by doing the same darned thing every time. They try to hide their murderer in obscurity. They try to make the character as unobtrusive as possible and in doing so, make them stand out a mile. The trouble is there are so many TV dramas and it’s been done so many times that the pattern is there for all to see. By always picking the person you don’t look at, it makes us look. It’s “The Butler Did It” for the modern world.

I will admit though, it doesn’t always work. There have been a few occasions in certain dramas in which I have been fooled by the murderer not being the most obscure person available and when I am, I rise up and applaud the writer in question for playing against the rules. What would seem like clumsy writing in the normal world – picking the most obvious candidate for the murder as the murderer – actually becomes a trope buster in the world of detective writing simply because it never happens.

Because in the extremely unlikely event I was ever to write any kind of detective whodunnit, I would have it that the person found splattered in blood with a nasty personal grudge against the victim would actually turn out to have done it but skipped the country while the detectives were busy questioning the quiet, helpful assistants and loving spouses of the victim’s angry, bitter kids. Because that really would be a surprise…;)