Sitting at the bar during a convention of crime writers at the Grand hotel in Bristol, nursing a pint, an exciting and inspired thought comes to mind: hey, wouldn’t this be a perfect setting for a murder mystery!
One thing that you learn quite quickly at a convention of crime writers, however, is this: there are no new murder mystery plotlines under the sun.
I mention my inspired and exciting thought to Antony Johnston, author of dozens of graphic novels and mysteries. He laughs in a friendly, pitying way. “I always say that someone is guaranteed to come up and say that exact thing to me at least once while I’m here,” he says. There are, apparently, several books already set at crime writers’ festivals. “Anthony Horowitz certainly did one, for a start…”
In the absence of groundbreaking originality, there are, at the Bristol CrimeFest, as in life, only endless new twists on old themes. This year’s novelty is GT Karber’s unstoppable idea, Murdle. Karber is one of the authors among the 100 published writers here who have cracked that most enduring of mysteries: how to make crime pay. On the first evening of this year’s festival, he is staging a live-action version of his Murdle whodunnit series, to get the party started. Before that, he sits down with me to explain how he did it.
The first Murdle book was the biggest seller in this country – and many others – last year knocking Guinness World Records and Richard Osman off the Christmas No 1 spot and this week named book of the year at the British book awards. Karber’s interactive book involved solving 100 murders, based on the daily puzzles that have attracted a huge online following. Murdle is a quick and addictive mix of Sudoku and Cluedo – each day the details of three or four suspects and murder weapons and locations are provided, along with a few witty clues and a useful tick box deduction grid. The reader is invited to solve the mystery alongside Karber’s resident Holmes and Watson, Deductive Logico and Inspector Irratino.
The phenomenon began life on the inevitable back of a restaurant napkin, at the beginning of 2022. Karber, who lives in LA, and is general secretary of the Hollywood Mystery Society – a sort of drinking game/crime-based cabaret of his own invention – is a screenwriter and editor, and was at the time in between small-scale film projects. “I’d made a few games that people could play on their phones, bite-size horror stories where people could click on different words, say,” he recalls. During one of the pandemic lockdowns he’d had a plan to put out a different mystery puzzle each week, but then he got Covid. Murdle was the first one he eventually created – and he sent it to a riddle-loving friend. The friend liked it, so he wrote a novel-length spreadsheet of characters and situations and created an algorithm that would use those scenarios to generate daily puzzles. The idea coincided with the launch of the puzzle Wordle in the New York Times, so the name came along naturally.
Karber, a likably excitable man, with a goatee beard, and several boyish layers of irony, feels in some ways – like many of the writers I speak to in Bristol – that he was born to this puzzling vocation. He is the son of two lawyers from Arkansas; his grandfather was an FBI agent in California in the 1960s. “To my mom’s great disappointment I didn’t go into the law,” he says. “Murdle has helped to justify that decision.”
To get into the frame of mind to write the 100 linked whodunnits in the first Murdle book (there are now three) he read GK Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, and watched a lot of Columbo re-runs. There is a long history of crime writers creating murderous puzzles – Agatha Christie, for example, was hired in 1930 to devise a detective treasure hunt to promote tourism on the Isle of Man – but the skill of creating any puzzle, as with the skill of writing any whodunnit, lies in pitching its level of difficulty somewhere between fiendish and satisfying.
Karber sought advice from “a puzzler magician in LA” called David Kwong, who sets crosswords for the New York Times, on how to get the balance right. Thinking of the repetitive nature of Murdle, he asked Kwong a question that had been nagging at him: “Why do people do sudokus every day, when it’s essentially the same puzzle?” Kwong knew the answer to that one: “Because people don’t want challenge, they just want to win!” From the beginning the aim of Murdle, Karber says, was to give you the feeling, “I solved the mystery!” rather than, “I’ll never solve this!”
His live event, for an audience who spend their days finding ways to delay and complicate just those feelings, will put that to the test.
* * *
Crime writing, not just Murdling, is booming. Nielsen, the data company that monitors reading habits, suggests that in the UK more than half a billion crime and thriller books were bought between 2013 and 2022, 100 purchases a minute, including a fifth of all audiobooks and more than a third of ebooks.
The Bristol CrimeFest is one among many that celebrate and serve that most reliably popular of all book groups. Murder-lovers can also, for example, find their habits catered to annually at Bloody Scotland (in Stirling) or Lyme Crime (in Dorset); at St Hilda’s, Oxford or at Noirwich. The Bristol event – which dishes out coveted awards – competes with Harrogate as the Glastonbury of the circuit (headliners here, later in the weekend, include Lynda La Plante, and James Lee Burke , names made to be embossed). Both festivals have a reputation – among crime writers at least – for unbridled hedonism. Two years ago, I’m told, the attendees here drank the bar dry, and the manager had to head up to Tesco’s for emergency supplies. Meanwhile, the whisper is: “What happens in Harrogate, stays in Harrogate.”
History suggests that the appetite for crime writing – and for puzzles and crosswords and quizzes more generally – rises and falls in relation to anxiety and fear in the world beyond. The golden age of crime fiction in the UK came immediately after the first world war and the Spanish flu pandemic. It’s easy to see the attraction of a country house murder – in which death is a problem for lovable eccentrics to solve at bedtime – when the news had been for so long full of random human carnage. Miss Marple and Father Brown, in making killing bloodless and cosy, offered a comforting alternative to memories of Gallipoli and the Somme.
You might argue that the current boom in crime writing and reading – and in puzzling and Only Connecting and pub quizzing – performs a similar escapist function in our own fractured times. Karber spent the early months of the pandemic rereading 40 Agatha Christie novels, he says, as a “soothing ritual”. “In dark times solvable death is a huge thing,” he says. “If you can sit down for an hour or two and figure out who’s to blame, point the finger at them, then we’re all good, we’re fine now. You know: we can solve this.”
With that thought in mind, at his Murdle event, I take a seat at a table that includes Martin Edwards, who has been called the “best living practitioner of the classic detective story” and who is the author of the award-winning history of the genre The Life of Crime. Also around the table are Johnston, whose graphic novel The Coldest City became a $100m movie starring Charlize Theron, and Matt Coot, who is at work on his first novel and has come with his own deerstalker hat and magnifying glass. How can we lose?
GT Karber becomes PT Barnum on stage. The elements of the game are simple enough. His co-host has been murdered – there is a roped-off crime scene, and the taped silhouette of a body on the conference room floor – and there are three suspects (all crime writers; one, Dan Malakin, with an extravagant Russian accent). The clutch of possible murder weapons include a furious moose (at the mention of which everyone but me smiles knowingly) and a copy of Murdle (which doesn’t look heavy enough to brain anyone).
For half an hour or so the crime writers wander the room, interrogating suspects, making notes, filling in their Murdle grids, pretending not to take getting the solution seriously.
Some appear more immersed in the immersive puzzle than others. Michael Sears, a maths professor, is a bit nonplussed. He shares a name badge – Michael Stanley – with his writing partner, Stanley Trollip, a professor of psychology, sitting next to him. Trollip tells me how they got together.
“All crime writers have a story,” he suggests. “Ours is this: I’m a private pilot, and in the summer, I would go birdwatching in Botswana, with a few friends. We were flying one afternoon over the plains in Botswana and we saw a pack of hyenas hunt and kill a wildebeest. When we returned in a couple of hours there was not a trace of it left; they eat the bones and everything.”
That evening, as you do, he and Sears got talking over a glass of wine about how “if we ever need to get rid of a body that is the perfect way to do it…”. That became the first scene of the first book they wrote together, A Carrion Death. They are now on their ninth in the series, collaborating by email across the Atlantic. “People say how can you write fiction with someone else?” Trollip says. “We say how can you do it alone?”
That collegiate spirit seems common to the crime writers here. Kaaron Warren, an Australian thriller writer, over from Canberra, suggests a reason: “I have a theory that people who deal with murder and death are always jolly in person,” she says. “I mean have you ever met a miserable butcher? It’s the same with us.”
Warren is one of the Murdle suspects. I don’t understand her clue, nor that provided by fellow suspect, Joanna Wallace, whose book, You’d Look Better As a Ghost, was described in the Guardian as “a welcome addition to the sub-genre of darkly humorous female serial killer novels”. Her heroine, she says, is a murderer of queue jumpers and generally annoying people: “She does what, inside, we’d all sometimes like to do,” she says.
I move, smiling, back to my table, where I appear to be the only person not to have cracked the Murdle.
While we wait for the results the talk turns to what’s new in the murder world.
The crime writers talk in shorthand about “cosies” (think Midsomer) and “procedurals”, and about the writers who have graduated from events like these to superstardom: Lee Child, Ann Cleeves and, lately, Mick Herron, whose long-running Slough House series is the Apple TV+ hit Slow Horses. That crossover remains the dream. There is, from some quarters, a bit of gentle grumbling about those writers who don’t put in the hard yards on the circuit before advancing to the top of the bestseller charts, the invasion of celebrity crime writers, following the bizarre success of Richard Osman’s books.
“Anton du Beke has one out,” someone says.
“And he’s not the only Strictly judge.”
Karber is by now back up on his feet announcing the winners – among them Matt Coot, who heads up in his deerstalker to collect some tickets for next year – before signing off with a pledge for us all to repeat: “I, Tim Adams, promise to investigate mysteries wherever they lead, and to have the courage to follow my head and my heart.”
The bar’s open. I wander back there with Martin Edwards, who imagined that Murdling would probably become easier the more you do it. Edwards, son of a steelworker, read his first Agatha Christie at eight; by the age of 10 he was writing his own detective stories – “spending a lot of time on chapter titles and pompous introductions” – and despite a long career as a solicitor, has never really stopped. In recent years, the crime festival circuit has taken him all over the world – Shanghai, Hawaii, Iceland – what’s not to like?
“In writing Life of Crime,” he says, “one of the things that fascinated me was the way that some writers’ careers seemed to grind to a halt. Five novels and then nothing. When I started to meet crime writers at festivals, I realised why…”
That reminds me, I say, of something that the novelist Colm Toíbín once said to me: there comes a time in any writer’s life when you have to decide what your relationship with alcohol is going to be.
“Quite right,” Edwards says. “On that note, shall we get a drink?”
