One of the most satisfying yet irritating feelings is guessing the killer right in a mystery. Lately, I’ve been watching and reading some mysteries, and I don’t remember the last time I didn’t guess the twist right. I’m in no way bragging, in fact, this prompted me to reflect on how I was able to accurately detect the culprit in these different stories. One day, I suddenly realized that subconsciously, there was a tactic I was using to guess the culprit. I didn’t even realize I was using it. 

Authors often craft characters very thoroughly, describing their appearances, backstory, and personality traits. Characters often even have quirks or unique hobbies. Additionally, whether it be the “protagonist”, the “sidekick”, or the “villain”, each character has some role they play. However, here’s where the trick comes in. In whodunits, there’s often one character that gets just a little too much screen time or just a little too much description. This is important. The author will bring up one excessive detail that triggers me to think, “why is this relevant?” This extra detail or scene means that the author put thought into this character, but if the character doesn’t seem to have a big role, it means they must serve some secret bigger purpose. This is how I’ve been guessing villains right for a while. 

To put it in simple terms, there will be a moment where the character’s role doesn’t seem important enough to elicit the attention the author is giving them.

To prove my point, here are some examples from popular books/movies (spoilers ahead):

Case #1 – Professor Quirrell (Harry Potter)

Professor Quirrell is a classic twist villain from one of the most popular children’s book series. While almost all of us were probably fooled into thinking Snape was after the Sorcerer’s Stone, we can use the trick I just described to see that Quirrell might have had more to him than meets the eye. 

Quirrell is an example of how his role doesn’t seem important enough for detail his character recieves. It’s clear to tell J.K. Rowling put thought into Quirrell because he has many quirks and interesting descriptions. First of all, he has a turban, which stands out amongst everyone else at Hogwarts. He also has a stutter and has a scene where he’s extremely afraid of a troll that breaks into the school. We know that he’s somewhat cowardly as he’s terrified of professor Snape. So the question comes up: why do we need to know any of this? Why did J.K. Rowling even waste her time characterizing Quirrell and giving him such a unique appearance? The only other teachers that are described in this kind of detail are ones like Snape and Dumbledore, but they serve big purposes in the story. We know nothing about other teachers like Flitwick, Hooch, and Sprout. Quirrell should just be any other teacher. By identifying that Quirrell has a little too much detail for justa random extra character, it’s clear to see there’s more than what meets the eye.

Case #2 — Jackie (Death on the Nile)

While I haven’t read Death on the Nile, I have seen the movie and guessed pretty quickly who the killer was by unintentionally using my tactic. In case you aren’t familiar with the story, Linnet and Simon are a recently married couple who are enjoying their honeymoon on a cruise ship. However, Jackie (Simon’s ex-fiancée), has been stalking the couple frequently and will not leave them alone. Linnet tells Poirot (the detective) that she doesn’t trust her guests, and later Linnet is found murdered. While the obvious answer is that Jackie has killed her, Jackie has an extremely solid alibi. So Poirot must investigate the others to figure out who did it. In the end, it turns out that Simon and Jackie committed the crime together. 

However, this twist could also be deduced using the method I described. If Jackie really did have an alibi, that means we the viewers just spent almost an hour watching Jackie’s creepy stalking for absolutely no reason. What would be the purpose of setting up their entire backstory, spending the entire first part of the movie describing how crazy Jackie is, if she serves no purpose in the end? If she wasn’t the killer, then there’s no point of her being in the story. Thus, Jackie must be involved somehow in the murder. By realizing how much detail is being put into Jackie, it is clear that her role has to be bigger than what the screenwriters want us to believe.

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One of the most crucial things when trying to figure out twist villains, if that’s what you’re trying to do, is analyzing each character’s role in the story. If the author is giving a character too much attention or if the character seems to be an unnecessary addition to the story, they might just have a bigger purpose than you think.

I can still remember the day my elementary school teacher read our class To Give a Mouse a Cookie. We had gathered around the carpet beneath our teacher’s rocking chair not too long before the bell was about to ring as the mid-afternoon sunlight poured through the window. My teacher started the book slowly. “If you give a mouse a cookie…”, she paused, “…he’s going to ask for a glass of milk.” She read steadily, flipping through the light illustrations and delicate sketches. She finally finished, reading, “And chances are if he asks you for a glass of milk…he’s going to want a cookie to go with it.” I smiled at the ending as she closed the book. She explained to us that the story had what she called a “full circle ending”. Just before the bell rang, she closed the book and told us that some of the best stories end how they start.

Some of the best stories end how they start. 

It was one of the first times someone had given me a direct message–a clear lesson–to take away from a piece of writing. It sparked a realization for me that stories were written and crafted; they didn’t just spontaneously appear out of the ground. Patterns within the pages of books were intentional, which meant that writing and analyzing a story was something that I myself could do.

I’ve adored reading since I was old enough to be able to do so. In preschool and elementary school, I used it as a way to escape. Reading was “my thing”. It was what my mom would tell other moms at parties. Some kids played sports, others sang in theater, and I wouldn’t put books down. But reading in class with the teacher made me realize that maybe there’s more to reading than an entertaining journey. Although I had already been reading chapter books by that point, that simple picture book was my first glimpse into the work writers put into their stories.

As reading in school became more challenging, I slowly began to change my perspective on books as we moved from picture books to heavier classics. That’s not to say these new books were overly difficult to comprehend or that I wasn’t interested in classics. I still read older literature outside of school, but I found that every time a book would be assigned, I found no pleasure in it. The books felt like such a drag, but for some reason, this never seemed like a threat to my identity as a reader. I never questioned why reading could be so hard when assigned. Some part of me just knew that I had my reasons for enjoying reading and that those reasons did not align with forced assignments,

One crucial reading assignment I had freshman year was George Orwell’s 1984. After assigned the first couple of chapters, I sat on my bed with my book in hand while skimming the pages. Half an hour later, I opened my eyes and realized my face was pressed into a page. I had fallen asleep. I had never before experienced book-induced sleep, but it had just happened as if I was a high school student in an overexaggerated movie. So if I really liked reading, then why

was this book so hard to get through? Did my enjoyment of books only go so far?

Yet, as we got to the end of1984, there was a chapter that changed my perspective. This chapter was an excerpt from a fictional text within the dystopian novel’s universe. That singular chapter near the end changed almost the entire book for me. It was so complex, I felt like I could spend months deciphering it and still miss certain details.

Even though certain school-assigned books have been challenging, I can still use them for my benefit despite them not being “entertaining”. I don’t know if I’d pick up difficult reads in my free time had school not helped me find value in learning beyond my personal experiences. While reading for fun allowed me to take what I wanted from a book, school gave me tools to explore outside my comfort zone. Everyone’s literary path is shaped by their experiences but in the end, the journey lies within what one does with the materials given to them. Different people, whether it’s parents or teachers or friends, will try to enforce their approach to reading. However, it seems we have our own responsibility to create a narrative of why we read.

Hi, I’m Sruthi. Welcome to my blog!

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