The Cluefinder Transcript

Caroline: The classic murder mystery is full of tropes. You will be familiar with lots of them: the closed circle of suspects, the automatic suspicion of the least likely perpetrator, the impossible crime, the locked room mystery, the final chapter reveal, the last minute twist.

In addition to these, a crime writer publishing a fair play mystery during the interwar period had some other tricks up their sleeve. A detective novel is a book, of course, but it is also a game played between writer and reader. The writer is trying to conceal the solution to the mystery for as long as possible, and all the while the reader is trying to discover it. In the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s, publishers and writers alike enjoyed making additions and modifications to their books that enhanced this murder mystery gameplay.

And one of these golden age tricks is now making a comeback. It can be found in novels being published in the 2020s, just as it was present in those from the 1920s.

Join me, won't you, for a closer look at the cluefinder.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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To explore the past, present and future of this most intriguing crime writerly device, I'm delighted to welcome back a frequent guest and friend of Shedunnit: Martin Edwards. Martin is both a crime writer and a critic of the genre. He's the author of many novels and short stories, as well as non-fiction titles like The Golden Age of Murder and The Life of Crime. He is the current president of the Detection Club and is the recipient of the Crime Writer's Association Diamond Dagger. He will also be known to many of you as the series editor for the British Library’s Crime Classics titles. And, most relevant to our episode today, he is a great fan of introducing golden age devices into his own contemporary crime fiction, and has been quietly repopularising the cluefinder over the past few years. His latest novel, Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, takes the game of fair play even further, and he joins me today to explain how he does this and why.

So I think the easiest place to start would be with the simplest possible question in this area, which is, what is a cluefinder?

Martin: Well, a cluefinder is a device that was dreamed up in the 1920s during the golden age of detective fiction, by J.J. Connington, a British chemist who wrote some very good whodunnits, elaborately structured.

And he was a great believer in fair play, giving the clues to the reader in the text of the story. And in one of his books, he decided to demonstrate that by indicating towards the end of the book which pages in the story the clues were to be found. And that was something that I imagine he thought of as a one-off, but it caught on.

And soon, quite a number of writers were doing the same sort of thing in a variety of different ways. Sometimes there would be footnotes, sometimes there'd be comments in the text. And then one or two writers started putting specific cluefinders at the back of the book. Really C. Daly King, the American behavioural scientist who dabbled in detective fiction quite successfully for a few years in the thirties, was the great exponent of that type of cluefinder.

Caroline: And so was this something that was concentrated in the interwar years?

Martin: Yes it really began to die out once the second World War came along, there were a few examples, I think post-war, John Dickson Carr and Edmund Crispin dabble with cluefinders. The last one that I can find is a curious example in a curious book. It's a Kingsley Amis novel, The Riverside Villas Murder in the seventies. A kind of pastiche golden age story at a time when the golden age was pretty much out of fashion.

But that particular book has a sort of cluefinder on the front flap of the dust jacket and there are only three clues in it. So it's a pretty timid attempt but at least it was there. At least he was trying.

Caroline: And how does the cluefinder fit into the golden age's focus on fair play? What part does it play in that?

Martin: I think it's something you can see alongside the challenge to the reader. The idea that by the time you eighty per cent, ninety percent through the book, all the clues have been laid before you. And some writers, Agatha Christie, being a prime example, never had an explicit challenge to the reader, but it was always implicit.

You've got all the material there. Can you outsmart Poirot? Or later on, Miss Marple, but some authors put an explicit challenge the reader in the book, Ellery Queen was the prime leader of that approach. There was a page that you would reach towards the end of the text saying you now know everything that Ellery knows.

Because of course the detective had the same name as the author, same pseudonym. And can you figure it out? And then there would often be a number of specific questions, and that device was picked up by other authors, including British authors. Anthony Berkeley did a couple of books towards the end of his career as novelist with challenges to the reader.

And the cluefinder is very much something that goes hand in hand with the challenge to the reader. In effect, proving that the clues are there in the text so that the author has definitely given you everything that you need to solve the puzzle or puzzles.

Caroline: Is there a temptation as a reader of these books to look at the cluefinder before you finish reading the book?

Martin: Well, Daly King, whom I mentioned was a very censorious guy, and he made it very clear that you shouldn't do that. And to some extent, of course, I agree, but of course, different people read detective stories in different ways.

Some people want to solve the mystery and some are just happy to be carried along for the ride. And I once conducted an informal survey and I found that amongst golden age fans that I contacted, probably about 50 percent of those made active efforts to solve the mystery. And that was probably a sample weighted disproportionately towards people who are interested in solving puzzles. So maybe the figure in the general population with most crime novels is rather less than 50 percent. But still I think there are quite a few people who, like me want to solve the mystery if it's one that can be solved by the reader.

Caroline: You mentioned C. Daly King there, and I think I read somewhere that you found his cluefinders very inspiring to your own work. Could you explain a little bit more about what he did?

Martin: Yes. He really took the cluefinder to an extreme. He set the clues out, and there were a lot of them, in the Obelist books in particular. He set them out in great detail and he would categorize them to some extent. And I found that very impressive.

And even if one finds some aspects of the story itself a bit trying, because he could be verbose the cluefinder is a real reward for persisting, persevering with with the experience of reading the book. And the intricacy of the way that he'd constructed the plots did greatly impress me, even if occasionally some of the prose was a bit less exciting.

Caroline: And so turning to the fortunes of golden age style fiction. You mentioned that Kingsley Amis last cluefinder as it were, and then there's been this more recent interest in the techniques and styles of the golden age again, and you have started including cluefinders in some of your more recent novels. Why did you do that? What was the thinking?

Martin: Yes. When I decided to try my hand at a golden age style book, a book set in the period, I came up with the concept of Rachel Savernake, a character who arrives in London and gets involved with solving baffling murder mysteries. But that book, Gallows Court, was very much an experiment and it was an attempt to try the golden age story from a different angle. Taking advantage of the fact I'm writing in the twenty-first century.

So looking at some of the darker psychological aspects of the crimes in the book and enjoying that freedom that maybe Sayers and Christie didn't have to the same extent and the idea of using golden age tropes greatly appealed to me.

But that book at that time didn't have a cluefinder. And to some extent it was a thriller, lots of twists, but it wasn't a conventional detective story by any means. But then luckily for me I was offered a two book contract. When I was thinking about book two, I decided to do something different again.

And write a book that was a truly intricate detective story in the classic vein. So intricate that it wasn't clear to the reader what particular mystery was at the heart of the book. And I felt that if I was doing something as elaborate as that, it was important to play fair with the readers who wanted to have a go at solving the mystery or indeed mysteries because there is several strands of plot in that book, Mortmain Hall. And it occurred to me that given my enthusiasm for cluefinders of the past, having a cluefinder in that book would be a great way of demonstrating that it was all there in the story, particularly the early parts of the story is fair to say, even when the nature of the mystery isn't by any means apparent.

So it was something I did as an experiment, as a bit of fun. I thought it would amuse me if nobody else and my publishers were happy with the idea. And so the book was published and much to my delight the cluefinder got a very good reception from reviewers and also from readers who got in touch.

So that encouraged me to keep going with the later books in the series. And that's what I've done. And in fact, the cluefinders have been so popular that the publishers have recently asked me to create a cluefinder for the first book, Gallows Court, which wasn't conceived in the same sort of way.

And when I looked at the text with this in mind I found luckily that there were enough clues to come up with a reasonable, although shorter cluefinder for that book too.

Caroline: And in those responses from readers, do you get a sense of what it is people like about having a cluefinder?

Martin: Yes. I think the people who've responded have tended to be people like me who like an intricate mystery, but don't want to feel cheated by it when they find out what's actually going on.

So they don't want to feel cheated in some intangible way and the cluefinder I think is something they find quite reassuring, sometimes quite funny. I like to make them amusing when the opportunity arises and quite gratifying and of course it's like any puzzle, any game, you can test yourself if you're so inclined and see how many of the clues you did manage to spot.

And of course, I'm always pleased when people confess they didn't spot anything like all of them. That's rewarding. But I also like to think that it would be possible for somebody who looked into my mind and then read the book to to figure it all out for themselves.

Caroline: So would you say that the cluefinder is evidence on the page there of the dialogue that goes on between writer and reader?

Martin: Very much. I think that this is part of the nature of the golden age story. There is an interactive element to my mind between the writer and the reader.

This is really a key difference between the golden age detective stories and say Sherlock Holmes, because with Sherlock, Arthur Conan Doyle wanted to play fair and in his terms he did because Holmes explains very carefully his chain of reasoning, but we don't see for ourselves with our own eyes, the information that he has on which he bases his deductions. So we can't beat him to it. We just stand back and we're impressed by his deductive skills.

Whereas the golden age, you've got the chance to take a more active role as a reader should you be so inclined. As I say, many people are not, but if you like that idea of solving the puzzle, the classic golden age story is really an ideal opportunity to do so and enjoy a good mystery as well.

Caroline: And of course, it's not necessary to take advantage of the cluefinder. It's more just a there if it's to your taste.

Martin: Absolutely. As with some of the jokes, some of the hat tips to the golden age. I think that certainly in my books I like to include a lot of material that you might see as bonus extras perhaps. You don't have to take an interest in them or even be aware they're there. And that doesn't spoil your enjoyment of the book I believe. But if you're attuned to those things, particularly if you're somebody who's steeped in golden age stories, then it's an additional little bit of fun.

Caroline: And turning to the practicalities of the cluefinder, you have a very puzzle orientated mystery in your new book, Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, which also has a cluefinder. Without giving anything away, how do you go about constructing the cluefinder for a book like that? What's the process?

Martin: Yes. It's the same process with both the Rachel Savernake books and now there are five with cluefinders since I've written one for Gallows Court and the same with Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, which is a contemporary mystery, although very much rooted in the golden age tradition of puzzle making.

And the way that I go about it is that I don't particularly think about what's going to be in the cluefinder until I finished the book, certainly the first draft of the book and maybe the second draft. I like to get the book into good shape before I give serious thought to the cluefinder because if you do it too quickly, then of course if you revise and I revise my novels very extensively and quite a few times, very often. Then of course the text changes and therefore potentially the clues or the way they're presented will change. So for me, it's something that comes at the end of the process or very close to the end of the process when you have the complete text there and you go back through the text and you look at the points that you've included, and of course when you're actually writing the book, it's in your mind that you want to foreshadow various plot developments so that things don't come out of the blue in an unsatisfactory, inartistic way. So I think your mindset is that you are planting these seeds as you go along with the writing. And certainly if you are very enthusiastic about puzzle mysteries, as I am, then that's really baked into the way that I write them.

So it's not too much of a stretch, having approached the book like that when you go back to the text, to pick out various pieces of information, which are clues of one kind or another. Sometimes they're hints, they're tips. They take a variety of forms naturally. And sometimes they come into categories and sometimes there might be a little flurry of clues all within the space of a few pages when a particular key scene or scenes take place.

It's something that I don't find I need to force because the material is there because the texture of the story is there after I've worked on it quite a few times.

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Caroline: Are you someone who likes to make a meticulous plan before you start writing, or do you allow things to develop as you're going?

Martin: A bit of both. I've become less of a planner over the years, and certainly Gallows Court wasn't planned at all. I just began with a situation, but it did take me three years to write that book. So I did plan Mortmain Hall, a very convoluted story in quite some detail.

But I always know with these books, leaving Gallows Court aside, because that is in a category of its own really I do always know who has killed whom and why. The motive. I'm not one for changing my murderer in a detective novel. I know some very good writers have done that and continue to do that.

But I don't, because to me the motive is very important. So I try to create the conditions when writing the book that will make it easier to have fun with the unraveling at the end of the story. And I find that I write faster as I'm coming to the end of the first draft because I too want to discover what's really going on, even though I know quite a bit of it. And during the process particularly in recent years, as I've got more experienced and more confident, I do allow myself more time and space to make things up as I'm writing.

For instance, with Hemlock Bay, the fifth Rachel Savernake book, there's a locked room mystery in the second half of the book, which wasn't part of my original thinking at all. But luckily I realised when I was thinking about where to go next with the story about halfway through that I'd actually placed in the story without intending to all the material I needed to create a locked room puzzle. It wasn't the main plot, it was a subplot, but it was a fun thing to do and it was lovely to have that eureka moment of finding yes, I can see how it works. I'm not going to need to rewrite to any significant extent. So that's very rewarding in itself.

Caroline: You mentioned that you like to revise your drafts extensively as you go along. Have you ever been putting together a cluefinder and spotted something, oh, actually, hang on, I don't want that to be there, or I want more of that?

Martin: Not particularly with the cluefinders. And I think that's partly because the cluefinder, as I say, comes towards the end of the process.

But I do get second thoughts and third thoughts and fourth thoughts as I'm writing, as I'm revising. I do think the revision is an important part of the process because it's a constant process of striving to improve, make it a better book because once you've sent it in, other than the bit of fine tuning, that is it: that is your book.

And I always have a feeling that I want to make it better. For that reason I never listen to my audio books, excellent as the actors who read them are. And the reason for that is because I just know that I would think maybe I could have done something else with it.

You never stop, I think, thinking of ideas about how to make a book better. But of course, in the real world, you have to draw a line because you want to complete it and send it out to the world.

Caroline: You mentioned that phenomenon of starting to write faster as you get near the end because you to know what's going to happen. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that thing that A.A. Milne said in his preface to one of the later editions of The Red House Mystery where he's a great enjoyer of detective fiction, but it turns out that writing one is not very enjoyable because you know what and he actually didn't like doing it as much as he thought he would.

You are both a great reader of detective fiction and also a writer of it. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that?

Martin: Yes, I know other writers who feel as Milne did. That's never been my thought process. I find a great satisfaction in the way that the strands of the stories come together, particularly in the more intricate novel.

I find it genuinely exciting and I think for me, that's important because I think if I'm excited about it, there's a chance that the reader will be excited about it too. I also feel you mentioned I read a lot of crime fiction and indeed crime fiction of all types from all countries.

I've got a very broad taste in the genre, but I do think that there are many books with brilliant openings and fantastic premises, but sometimes you come to the end, I think this is sometimes the case with some psychological suspense , some domestic noir, but it's true of other branches of the genre as well, that there is sometimes a slight feeling of anti-climax when you get to the great twist. And maybe it isn't quite the sensational thing that that the publishers wanted you to believe. It was. And I think for me the ending is really important in a crime novel.

And it's important that it should leave the reader with a sense of satisfaction. Not necessarily that justice has been done, because sometimes it isn't done even in Agatha Christie and other golden age novels. There are exceptions to that principle, but in some way there should be some feeling of resolution and completeness, even if the criminal has escaped conventional justice. And I think that satisfaction is all the greater, if the final part of the book has been constructed in such a way that there's an element of surprise and wonder as well as explanation.

Caroline: And so with a book like Miss Winter, where you've got just such an intriguing set up and premise, how difficult was it to bring it to a conclusion that still had a surprise in it? When you've given yourself a lot of restrictions and conditions?

Martin: Yes. Yes. It was a different type of book to write and different from the Rachel Savernake novels, partly, because it's lighter in tone. Partly because there are puzzles in the story, although I was always very determined that it should be a novel, first and foremost, it would stand or fall by its merits or lack of merits as a crime novel. That was absolutely important to me. But the experience of writing it was initially quite challenging because I felt it was slightly outside my comfort zone.

Of course, it's a good thing to write outside your comfort zone, but it was, again, really only as the different strands of the plot came together and I was able to think more clearly about the connection between the rules of the game that the characters are playing, that are set out at the start of the novel and the game that the reader can play if they're so inclined.

The connection between that and the way that the story would come together with all the different strands being pulled together hopefully in this satisfactory way. It was only at a fairly late stage with the first draft that it became easier that I saw light at the end of the tunnel. And believe me, that was a wonderful, that was a wonderful experience because of course when you're halfway through a book, sometimes you do wonder.

Caroline: Yes, whether you'll ever get to the end, it'll have an ending. Yes, absolutely. You mentioned the little puzzles that go along, which are woven into this game that the characters are playing, but obviously they're there for the reader to solve as well. As a puzzle enjoyer, are you a proud puzzle setter? Do you like setting them as well?

Martin: Yes I've enjoyed writing those puzzles and I particularly enjoy the puzzles that integrate into the mystery novel, so I enjoy plotting the Rachel Savernake novels enormously. I did quite a lot of research of puzzle books and I had a go at solving some of them.

One or two of them, The GCHQ Puzzle Book, I found absolutely impossible to solve. I had to retire defeated with that. It's so difficult. So I resolved that my puzzles would not be as difficult as that. But because of course when a book like this is to a degree aimed at the Christmas market and people buy the book in some cases as gifts. You see a lot of reviews of these books as 'excellent, I've bought it for so and so who loves puzzles and they'll love it'. You don't always read reviews from the people who've actually solved the puzzles. I do wonder how many of them actually do.

Caroline: No, I know what you mean. How many of them get discarded on Boxing Day in defeat?

Martin: That's right. And of course, that was something I was hoping to avoid.

Caroline: It's a Goldilocks situation, isn't it? It needs to be neither too hot nor too cold, just right. So when it comes to the cluefinder and the resurgence of the cluefinder in your own work. And a few other authors like Tom Mead includes them in his conjuring novels and so on as well. Do you have any thoughts about why it's now palatable or indeed popular to have this golden age thing in your book again, and maybe it wouldn't have been 20, 25 years ago?

Martin: It certainly wouldn't have been of any great interest, certainly to publishers, 20 years ago my first series of novels written mainly in the nineties, the Harry Devlin novels, had lots of golden age references, which nobody ever picked up on. And I realized many years later that I'd overlooked the fact that I was in a small minority certainly of writers at that time who were deeply interested in the golden age, but things have changed in the last 10 to 12 years and as the success of Shedunnit illustrates that people are interested in a good mystery and a good puzzle. So it's come back into fashion and it's come back I think for a number of reasons. Partly we can say that there are some parallels between modern life and life in the thirties in some respects. It's partly simply a question of changing fashion, the cycle of fashion, but I think that people have always liked puzzles.

More and more of the older books are available. People have discovered that actually many of them are very good, and that's encouraged certainly me and it's encouraged many other writers. You've mentioned Tom Mead and he is one of them, and there are many others on both sides of the Atlantic and in other countries, Japan, for instance and to some degree even in China. People who are interested in writing these puzzle type mysteries and happily are finding a bigger readership than we were led to believe a few years ago would ever exist.

Caroline: Do you have a favorite novel from the golden age that employs a cluefinder that you would recommend people seek out?

Martin: I think that I have to go back to C. Daly King. There's a book of his which is an extraordinary performance. It was actually reprinted in the eighties under the stewardship of Julian Symons, who wasn't particularly associated with being a lover of golden age fiction, far from it.

But he was right to highlight Obelists Fly High by Daly King as an extraordinary performance, a brilliant box of tricks. I think he said, and it really is. It begins with an epilogue. Something incidentally I did in Mortmain Hall because I like the idea so much. It's a crazy book in some ways, but it's very intricate very clever. And the cluefinder is just a joy to read and to see how he did what he did to pull off this quite amazing conjuring trick is quite delightful.

Caroline: So you think in that case it, it is delightful because sometimes with magic tricks they say that all the wonder of it goes once you know how it was done, whereas you'd say it was the reverse?

Martin: Yes, I would say it's the reverse. And you're absolutely right about that, Caroline. And of course, some people believe you could never read an Agatha Christie twice because why would you bother when you know the solution? I'm very much not in that camp. I think that certainly from a writer's perspective, there's a lot of pleasure and satisfaction to be had in seeing how it's done. But also you can reread for pleasure and pick up different things. This is not true of all golden age detective fiction or all modern detective novels in that vein, but it's true of many of them. I think that there are things that you might have overlooked the first time around.

Not just the clues but other things as well. Little details of characterisation, humour or whatever it might be. So I'm I'm not a believer that simply knowing the answer spoils further enjoyment.

Caroline: I'm a great rereader of things as well and especially when you've got a novel that doesn't have a cluefinder, your second read can be a de facto construction of one, almost. You spot the things as you go back through.

So I think just to wrap up, I'd love to know, are there any other publishing features of golden age novels, you mentioned challenge to the reader. There was also, the habit of the sealed portion. Anything else like that you'd like to see come back?

Martin: Yes. I've always been a fan of those crime dossiers. They're not really novels, but the Dennis Wheatley-J.G. Links dossiers, the four of them. And they're also several published in the States written by a variety of authors, Helen Riley, and one or two others.

And although they're not novels I think that those are great fun. And in this era of Murdle and puzzle books. I wouldn't be surprised to see somebody doing something along those lines. And again, you might think maybe technology can come into play. Interactivity.

I did in the early days. I'll let you into secret. I did toy quite seriously with the idea of making Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, a sort of interactive, technologically interactive novel with clues to be found on the internet or something like that. And there's a game called Cryptic Killers, which my editor actually introduced me to she's a great fan of it and she's absolutely right. It's great fun. And so that sort of idea does appeal to me. I didn't actually go down that road with Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, but it is something that might be doable in the future.

Caroline: Thank you very much, Martin. That was incredibly interesting and I'm sure once everyone's perused the cluefinder for Miss Winter, they will have thoughts that they wish to share with you.

Martin: I'll be delighted to hear from them. Thank you.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written and produced by me, Caroline Crampton. Many thanks to my guest, Martin Edwards. His latest novel, Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife, is available to order from all good bookshops and you can find out more about his work at his website, martinedwardsbooks.com. Many thanks also to the team at BBC Radio Orkney for their help with this episode.

You can find links to all the books and sources we referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/thecluefinder. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like to ensure the podcast's continued existence and get some extra audio goodies in the bargain, become a paying supporter now at shedunnitbookclub.com/join.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.