On paper, a murder mystery sounds pretty simple.
Someone has been murdered, you have a room full of suspicious people and one of them is the killer. All you need to do is work out who did it.
Easy, right?
Yes, in theory.
A really good murder mystery needs to give you enough information to actually solve the crime, without making the answer obvious. You need suspects you don’t quite trust, clues that may or may not be important and enough red herrings to make you change your mind at least a couple of times.
And, for us at least, the best reaction to a final reveal isn’t “Well, how were we supposed to know that?”
It’s “Oh! Of course! How did I miss that?”
So, what actually goes into making a great murder mystery?
Here are seven things we think every good whodunnit needs.
1. A Victim Everyone Had a Reason to Kill
This sounds terrible, but your murder victim probably shouldn’t be too popular.
If they’re a lovely person who everybody adored, you’re going to struggle to find enough suspects. If half the room secretly hated them? Now we’ve got a mystery.
Maybe they were a ruthless businessman who made their fortune at other people’s expense. Perhaps they were blackmailing someone, having an affair, threatening to cut somebody out of their will or sitting on a secret that could ruin someone’s life.
The point is that there shouldn’t be one obvious person with a reason to want them dead.
Ideally, after you’ve spoken to all the suspects, you should be thinking less “Who would want to kill this person?” and more “Who wouldn’t?”.
2. Suspects With Their Own Secrets
Everyone should be hiding something.
That doesn’t mean everyone secretly committed a murder, obviously. It would make the detective’s job significantly more complicated.
But if everyone except the killer is completely honest, it becomes pretty easy to spot the guilty person.
So perhaps one suspect is having an affair. Someone else has a gambling problem. Another person stole something from the victim. Maybe somebody wasn’t where they claimed to be because they were doing something completely unrelated that they’d really rather not explain in front of everyone.
That’s what makes interrogating suspects fun.
3. A Motive Worth Killing For
It’s not enough for someone to find the victim annoying.
Otherwise most workplaces would have a considerably higher body count.
There needs to be something at stake.
Money is an obvious one. So are revenge, jealousy and fear. But whatever the motive is, it needs to feel believable for that particular character.
Maybe the victim was about to expose something they’d spent years hiding. Maybe they stood between the suspect and a huge inheritance. Perhaps something the victim did years ago completely destroyed their life.
This is why motive matters so much when you’re trying to solve a mystery.
A clue might tell you how the murder happened, but understanding the suspects starts to tell you why it happened.
And when three or four people have genuinely good reasons to want the victim gone, things get much more interesting.
Why Motives Matter: The Secret to Solving Any Murder Mystery
4. Clues That Actually Give You a Chance
This is a big one for us.
If you’re going to ask people to solve a murder, they need to actually be able to solve it.
Imagine spending an entire evening carefully questioning suspects, reading letters and piecing together evidence, only for the detective to announce:
“What none of you knew was that the victim had a secret identical twin living in Belgium!”
Right.
That would have been useful information earlier.
A good murder mystery should play fair. You don’t have to immediately understand every clue you find, but the information you need to reach the answer should be there somewhere.
Maybe a receipt proves that someone’s timeline doesn’t quite add up.
Perhaps an old photograph shows that two people knew each other long before they claimed to.
Or somebody makes a tiny comment during an interrogation that contradicts something another character told you half an hour ago.
Sometimes the most important clue isn’t the dramatic bloody knife sitting in the middle of the evidence table.
It’s the tiny detail you almost ignored.
5. Red Herrings That Actually Mean Something
Of course, if every clue pointed directly towards the murderer, we’d be finished rather quickly.
This is where red herrings come in.
You find a threatening letter in someone’s handbag.
Well. That’s not looking good for them.
Except perhaps the threat has absolutely nothing to do with the murder.
Maybe somebody was heard having a furious argument with the victim ten minutes before their death. Very suspicious… until you discover they were arguing about the necklace they had stolen earlier that evening.
For us, the best red herrings aren’t just random pieces of evidence thrown in to confuse people.
They should reveal something.
They might expose an affair, uncover another crime or reveal that a character has been lying to you all evening.
They just don’t necessarily reveal the murderer.
And yes, we do enjoy watching people become completely convinced that one of these clues has solved the entire case.
6. Characters You Actually Want to Talk To
This is particularly important with an interactive murder mystery because you’re not sitting at home reading a book.
The suspects are standing right there.
You can question them.
And they can lie directly to your face.
So the characters need to be fun.
You want to question the glamorous countess whose story seems to change every time you speak to her. You want to know why the nervous assistant keeps avoiding a particular question. You absolutely want another conversation with the magician who insists that his ability to make things disappear has nothing whatsoever to do with the missing evidence.
7. A Reveal That Makes Everything Click
And then we get to our favourite part.
The reveal.
By this point, accusations have been made. Alliances have formed. Someone in your group has probably become deeply committed to a theory that nobody else believes.
Then the detective starts going through the evidence.
That comment from earlier suddenly makes sense.
The weird receipt you almost ignored turns out to matter.
That lie wasn’t hiding what you thought it was hiding.
And slowly everything starts fitting together.
A good reveal shouldn’t just tell you who the murderer is. It should show you how the clues you’ve been collecting all evening lead to them.
You might not have solved it.
But you could have.
And that’s the important bit.
We want you to leave thinking:
“It was right there. I nearly had it.”
Although, inevitably, somebody in your group will insist they knew who it was from the beginning.
Whether you believe them is entirely up to you.
So, What Makes the Perfect Murder Mystery?
There’s no single formula, but for us it’s all about balance.
You want enough suspects to keep people guessing, but not so many that nobody remembers who anyone is. You want plenty of clues, but not so many that the investigation becomes overwhelming. You want red herrings, but they still need to have a reason for being there.
Most importantly, the mystery needs to feel solvable.
That’s something we really care about when creating our murder mysteries at Foxtrot Productions.
Every suspect has something to hide. Some of those secrets are embarrassing, some are scandalous and some might send you completely down the wrong path.
But somewhere amongst the lies, motives, relationships and evidence is everything you need to work out what really happened.
You just have to find it.
Think you’ve got what it takes to crack the case?
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