murder.booklocker.com

I think I’ve written elsewhere that I have a friend who enjoys mysteries, in fact, almost any kind of puzzle (crossword, jigsaw), because of the challenge there is in fitting all the pieces together to make a whole. This same friend was dismayed that in PARK RIDGE the reader knows WHOdunnit. I promised that the sequel would be.

Today someone posted a review of PARK RIDGE at Amazon with the comment:

“While I usually enjoy figuring out who the murderers are, discovering the ‘why’ is an interesting twist.”

According to Wikipedia:

“Many credit [Ruth Rendell] and her good friend P.D. James for upgrading the entire genre of ‘whodunnit’, shaping it more into a whydunnit.”

I love the running together of words to make a new one, in this case, “how does he catch them?”, which makes for a pretty good description of my particular WHYdunnit:

“An important variation on the whodunit is the inverted detective story (also referred to as “howshecatchem”) where the guilty party and the crime are openly revealed to the reader/audience and the story follows the investigator’s efforts to find out the truth while the criminal attempts to prevent it.”

The defining characteristic of a WHYdunnit is the emphasis on the characters and their motivation. That’s one big reason why it was important for me to include the card players talking with each other before and after the kills. It’s also why I decided to include videotaped interviews which I used to reveal even more about the character’s motivation for (or certainly their leaning toward) murder. The murderer’s own thoughts and movements in the act of killing are highlighted by my use of special sections: first person present tense, set off from the rest of the narrative by a block-indent and change of font.

So, although I agree with the reviewer that solving puzzles is a kick, the WHYdunnit provides a good change of pace which Rendell et. al. turned into an art form.