5 Great Mystery Novels That Are “Howdunnits”

The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester
A classic sci-fi book from the 1950s that remains as much fun today, it’s also the rare SFF book that will appeal as much to mystery fans. It’s set in a future where telepaths—known officially as Espers and colloquially as “peepers”—are part of everyday society, with powerful telepaths in the highest government positions and lower-class Espers embedded in business and law enforcement. As a result, no homicide has been committed in 70 years—because how can you commit a murder when people can read your mind? Ben Reich plans to try. His family business is failing, and as his sanity goes with it, he blames his business rival Craye D’Courtney. He sets out to murder D’Courtney and escape the ultimate punishment he will face if he’s caught—the mysterious process of “demolition.” You know who the killer is, and you watch him plan out his dark deed—all that’s left is the fascinating tale of how, and if, he’ll get caught.

The Crossing, by Michael Connelly
Connelly doesn’t come right out and say the two cops Harry Bosch finds himself at odds with are crooked, and the culprits behind the murder of Lexi Parks, but he makes it very clear. Bosch, at this point in the series forced into an unhappy retirement and reluctantly working as an investigator, knows every trick a dirty cop can use to hide errors, plat evidence, and generally gin up a case where none exists, and he can tell from his first glance at the Parks case file that nothing in it is right. The true fun of the novel is following Bosch’s dogged efforts to figure out what really happened.

A Kiss Before Dying, by Ira Levin
This classic noir is evergreen; no matter how many decades pass, the core story remains chillingly plausible. Bud Corliss meets Dorothy, the young daughter of a wealthy tycoon, and begins a secret romance with her, seeing a comfortably wealthy future for himself. When she becomes pregnant out of wedlock, however, he knows her father will disown her. He tricks Dorothy into writing what could be taken as a suicide note, then throws her off a roof. He arranges to meet and woo her sister Ellen, which goes well—until Ellen’s conviction that her sister wasn’t a suicide forces him to murder her, too. He moves on to the third sister, Marion—who he successfully seduces and becomes engaged to. None of this is a mystery to the reader; the only mystery is whether Bud will be exposed and punished before he manages to get his hands on the family fortune. The skilled depiction of a sociopath remains a powerful reading experience, even without the mystery element.

Complete Works of R. Austin Freeman, by R. Austin Freeman
Freeman is credited with more or less inventing the “howdunnit,” a.k.a. the “inverted detective story.” His character Dr. Thorndyke is also regarded as one of the earliest conceptions of a modern-style “forensic detective,” relying on scientific analysis of clues to lead him to a solution. In most of Freeman’s stories, the crime is depicted in detail, and the perpetrator is identified. The joy lies in how Dr. Thorndyke arrives at the solution. Over dozens of novels and short stories, Thorndyke—depicted as a medical doctor who leaves the field to become a lawyer—surprises readers with his experiments, most of which Freeman conducted in real life in order to be certain of their veracity.

Rope, by Patrick Hamilton
The stage play that formed the basis for Hitchcock’s famous one-take film was in turn based on the real-life story of Nathan Leopold and Richard Albert Loeb, who kidnapped and murdered a 14-year old boy in order to prove their intellectual superiority by committing the perfect crime (they failed). The story begins with the murder and the hiding of the body just before a dinner party thrown by the killers. The tension isn’t due to any sort of mystery, but rather to the horror of what’s going on, and the slowly rising tension as their teacher—the man who unknowingly inspired their psychotic theories about superiority—begins to piece together what’s happened, and what’s inside the trunk his former students are using as a buffet.