There are two kinds of mystery readers: the ones who guess the killer by page 60, and the ones who say so. The first kind is clever. The second kind is not invited to book club.
Here is how to be the first kind.
The method
1. Suspect the helpful. The person who keeps turning up with tea and useful information is doing it for a reason, and the reason is that the author needs them near the detective. Nobody in a mystery is kind for free.
2. Watch who gets described. If the author spends a paragraph on a minor character’s hands, or their coat, or the fact that they used to be a nurse, the character is not minor. Authors don’t waste description on people who are only there to be a butler.
3. Count the alibis. The person with the perfect alibi is a suspect. The person with no alibi is a decoy. The person with a slightly wrong alibi, who was “at the pub until about ten,” is the one. Mysteries hate precision. Precision is a confession.
4. Find the first liar. Someone lies early, about something small. A time, a name, whether they’d met the victim. It is the small lie that unravels in chapter twenty. Underline it. Do not underline library books.
5. Ignore the obviously guilty. The red-faced colonel who shouted at the victim in chapter two is innocent. He has always been innocent. The author gave you him so you’d have someone to look at while the nurse walked past.
6. Ask who benefits, then ask who benefits quietly. The will is a decoy. The real motive is thirty years old and involves a woman named Edith.
The etiquette
Now, the harder part. You have guessed. You are, let’s say, right. Here is what you do with that.
Say nothing. To your partner, who is reading the same book two weeks behind you. To the group chat. To the person on the train with the same cover. The pleasure of a mystery is in the finding out, and you don’t get to take it from someone because you got there first.
Keep a private tally. A notebook, or a page in the reading journal, where you write the name and the page number. Then, at the end, a tick or a cross. This is where the satisfaction goes. It is enough. It has to be enough.
If you were wrong, say nothing about that either. The urge to explain why your theory was better than the actual solution is strong and should be resisted. The author wrote the book. You read it. These are different jobs.
At book club, go last. Let everyone say who they thought it was. Nod. If pressed, say “I had a feeling about the nurse” and leave it there. You will be regarded as modest and perceptive. You will be invited back.
The exception
If someone asks, directly, “did you guess it?”, you may say yes. Once. Without a page number.