https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UFWjGxZRWs

Back in the 19th and 20th centuries, if you wrote murder mysteries for a living, which my Dad and two uncles did during and just after the Great Depression of the 1930s, you probably used the expression “Murder most foul!” at least once in the course of your main character’s investigation and of course, the inevitable sitting-room “reveal”, where we learn that the villain had done nothing suspicious throughout the first part of the book.

It was in fact a given that the key clues would typically not appear until the next-to-the-last page of the aforesaid mystery novel. Continue reading →