Whodunit

[5] Here, the diegesis, or the way the characters live on the inquiry level creates the phantom narration where the objects, bodies, and words become signs for both the detective and the reader to interpret and draw their conclusions from.

This process, however, also involves on the part of the detective the production of a hypothesis that could withstand scrutiny, including the crafting of findings about cause and motive as well as crime and its intended consequences.

[7] According to Tzvetan Todorov, in terms of temporal logic, the whodunit narrative is considered a paradigm for fiction in general because the story unfolds in relation not to a future event but one that is already known and merely lying in wait.

[12] The "whodunit" flourished during the so-called "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", between the First and Second World Wars,[13] when it was the predominant mode of crime writing.

Many of the best-known writers of whodunits in this period were British – notably Agatha Christie, Nicholas Blake, G. K. Chesterton, Christianna Brand, Edmund Crispin, Michael Innes, Dorothy L. Sayers, Gladys Mitchell and Josephine Tey.

[13] In addition to Christie, Brand, Sayers, Mitchell, and Tey, major writers also included Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.

[13] Over time, certain conventions and clichés developed which limited surprise on the part of the reader – vis-à-vis details of the plot – the identity of the murderer.

One reaction to the conventionality of British murder mysteries was American "hard-boiled" crime fiction, epitomized by the writings of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane, among others.

Though the settings were grittier, the violence more abundant and the style more colloquial, plots were, as often as not, whodunits constructed in much the same way as the "cozier" British mysteries.

The 1935 commercial parlour game Jury Box sees the players cast as jurors who are given the scenario of the murder, the evidence presented by the prosecutor and defendant, two photographs of the crime scene and ballot papers.

The Columbo TV movie series is the classic example of this kind of detective story (Law & Order: Criminal Intent and The Streets of San Francisco also fit into this genre).

This tradition dates back to the inverted detective stories of R Austin Freeman, and reached an apotheosis of sorts in Malice Aforethought written by Francis Iles (a pseudonym of Anthony Berkeley).

Successors of the psychological suspense novel include Patricia Highsmith's This Sweet Sickness (1960), Simon Brett's A Shock to the System (1984), and Stephen Dobyns's The Church of Dead Girls (1997).

Examples of pastiche are the Sherlock Holmes stories written by John Dickson Carr, and hundreds of similar works by such authors as E. B. Greenwood.

The burglar of the title is Bernie Rhodenbarr, who has booked a weekend at an English-style country house just to steal a signed, and therefore very valuable, first edition of Chandler's The Big Sleep, which he knows has been sitting there on one of the shelves for more than half a century.