The New York Times regularly publishes Special crossword puzzles for subscribers. The puzzles are designed to have the difficulty of an early-week puzzle and to use the theme throughout. The title of this puzzle is “Whodunnit?” It was constructed by Rian Johnson, an Oscar-nominated director who created the “Knives Out” films and the television series “Poker Face,” and Christina Iverson, a puzzle editor.
The golden age of detective fiction is generally considered to have been in the 1920s and ’30s. The formula for those stories is fairly standardized: A mysterious group of people find themselves in a mansion at the invitation of an eccentric host. A crime, usually a murder, takes place, and it’s up to the cast to solve it. There’s a mystery afoot, so naturally, a detective appears.
Despite the cookie-cutter nature of the main plot elements, a few star writers emerged who were able to keep readers guessing. Many of these great authors were women and even today are still some of the most printed authors in history. I remember being taught Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh novels in school, to learn about plot structure, and on the one hand, I think fondly of these works, which were ultimately part of what pushed me to pursue writing.
On the other hand, many of these works are reflective of the time they were written. Writers in this “golden age” used many racist stereotypes, and in several cases their work has been edited or updated to remove passages that are overtly offensive or rooted in discrimination.
But I’m glad that a new crop of modern authors, such as TK and TK, are continuing the detective fiction tradition in a more inclusive way today. These novels are puzzles at their core, and using logic to solve the mystery before it’s revealed in the book is, to me, the main pleasure in reading them. And let’s not forget: Games are meant to be fun. A mystery that needs solving activates the same part of my brain that seeing a blank crossword grid does. There’s a deep human need to fill in the blank.
That spirit of this fun lives on today. Take Rian Johnson, a co-constructor of today’s puzzle and the writer-director of the “Knives Out” series of detective films. In the first, a best-selling mystery author dies, and Benoit Blanc, a charismatic and inquisitive private eye played by Daniel Craig, must investigate.
These films are emblematic of the modern version of the grand mystery, along with others like “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Gone Girl” and even “Parasite,” to an extent. They show that despite over a hundred years of changes to the genre, it endures as one of the most popular for good reason. Even if you guess the answer wrong, they’re just plain fun.
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66-Across: Fingerprint or footprint, e.g.
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