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So cool you’re writing a mystery! I write mystery games, so my experience is very hands-on; creating a mystery hard enough to be challenging and logical enough the players don’t feel cheated after the reveal. I can say two of the biggest things to know are 1) the answer should not be “whodunit” and 2) the deduction must be calculated.

What I mean by ‘the answer should not be whodunit’ is that the name of the killer isn’t enough of a surprise. Something additional should also be in the twist.

Christie is amazing at this. I can’t say titles, to avoid spoilers, but some of her ‘beyond whodunit’ twists include:

The killer being more than one suspect

The killer being a victim

The killer framing their victim for framing them for murder to get their victim on death row (bit convoluted, sorry XD)

The killer being the most suspicious person (more of a sleight-of-hand)

I make it a point in my mysteries to never just have the answer be, “Mr. X did it.”

“The deduction must be calculated’ means making a table of your suspects and doling out suspicious characteristics. The method takes each of the extenuating elements (Alibi, Motive, Opportunity, Access to the Weapon, Mental Ability, Physical Ability) and creates a hierarchy of suspicion.

An example:

Your suspects are (for simplicity’s sake) our beloved Clue characters. We’ll make Miss Scarlet the killer. This means she must check all the boxes: Her alibi can’t be proven; she has a legitimate motive; she had an opportunity to commit the crime; she had access to the weapon at the time; she is physically capable of handling her weapon of choice to kill the victim and has the mental strength/weakness to commit murder.

From here, we move to the suspect we wish to be the second most suspicious…let’s do Colonel Mustard. We’ll have him check all the boxes—except one. Suppose he doesn’t have a legitimate motive.

For our third most suspicious, we’ll take Mr. Green and uncheck two boxes—he didn’t have access to the weapon and he isn’t mentally capable of killing the victim.

So on until you get to the suspect you need to seem the least suspicious. At that point, depending on how many suspects you have, they should only check one or two boxes—or maybe none.

What keeps readers from immediately following the line of deduction is the difficulty in determining some of these things. How do you know if someone has the mental ability to kill? A lot of this is for yourself, a template to build your suspects off.

Hope that wasn’t too complicated!