Welcome to your Murder Mystery Detour! Once a whenever-we-can, Flex and Herds go live (or undead, as the case may be), to talk about their latest fixations in the crime fiction world, and we hear from you about yours! We're also joined by our editor, Cameron Furlong, producer Max Mahood, and feature an interview from Jonathan Chang. Our guests are Brydon Coverdale, Dinuka McKenzie, and Robert Connolly.

This iteration, we spoke about:

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We talk with Quinns from People Make Games to about the Mystery Role-Play craze that has taken hold of China; Jubensha. What sets it apart from the Mystery Dinner Parties that accompany every crime fiction festival and book club? We also speak about role-play in the English speaking world, the complications of safety tools, and more of Quinns' experience playing Jubensha during his investigation. Make sure you also catch Quinns' work on Shut Up & Sit Down, and his new TTRPG channel Quinn's Quest.

We discuss the season finale of The Simpsons sixth season, and its infamous puzzle. Springfield Elementary is almost destroyed in an eruption, but fortunately, it's an eruption of oil, so they're wealthy now. At least, they would be, if Mr. Burns wasn't up to his antics, preparing to destroy all that is good in the world. Nobody in Springfield is free from his cruel machinations, so when he dies, we shouldn't be surprised, but the killer has the perfect alibi. Can you solve this mystery? Flex probably can't because he watched in 16:9.

We're also joined by Quinns from People Make Games to talk about the Mystery Role-Play craze that has taken hold of China; Jubensha. What sets it apart from the Mystery Dinner Parties that accompany every crime fiction festival and book club? Get your TTRPG shoes on, it's time to cry. Speaking of which, make sure you also catch Quinns' work on Shut Up & Sit Down, and his new TTRPG channel Quinn's Quest.

Herds presents the much coveted Golden pants award straight from Sulari Gentill’s wardrobe to… Everyone, and by that we don’t mean the heart-warming everyone, as in everyone’s a winner, but rather the Everyone series by Benjamin Stevenson. That’s right, two books can share a placement, as long as they’re written by the same author. There was much internal debate on the Death of the Reader team as to how we could possibly choose one over the other, but with the power of a year long symmetry and some personal bias towards quirky meta narratives, we decided we couldn’t separate these two, bound by birth in a double homicide into our hearts and, we hope, yours.

Review Season is about recommendations. You don’t need someone to recommend you Sherlock Holmes. Whether or not you have read Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, watched one of the many renditions, or experienced some form of pastiche, there is no doubt that some comparison to Sherlock Holmes worms its way into your life. Especially if you said something painfully obvious. What is far, far less common, is work endorsed by the Conan Doyle Estate. Coming in 2nd Place for our 2023 Recommendations is Moriarty, one of two ‘official’ continuation stories commissioned by the estate from powerhouse writer Anthony Horowitz.

There are three entries here and only one can take back the coveted Sulari Gentill prize, winning for themselves eternal glory and golden dance pants to take home. In the bronze position, standing tall head and shoulders over a dozen others, the bloody, the historical, The Red Death Murders written by Jim Noy. Noy’s work brings together three of Herds favourite aspects of historical fiction. You’ve got your gothic horror, your old timey medieval politics, and your elaborate medieval castles. Boy does he love a good castle. The novel is set during a semi-fictional period of time during the Red Death of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, Mask of the Red Death.

It’s time for the controversial entry in our list of high class detective fiction, there’s always one. Usually any films that we cover will be contentious in terms of placement, is it really fair to place a work of a visual medium in the same competition as some musty old books? Am I even qualified to talk about film theory? Well, I’ll have you know that I completed at least one, and I quote: “unspecified film studies unit” in the course of my school education, so I’m the most qualified person in the room. It is of course Glass Onion by Rian Johnson that takes the fourth place in our competition for 2023, just shy of the grand podium. When this film came out I was excited, despite its strange titling as: Glass Onion, a Knives Out Story, I was intrigued. It seemed to be tackling more modern ideas, bringing the original structure of the classic Christie with the rich family suckling at the teat of their patriarch into a contemporary story, instead with a gaggle of successful celebrities reliant on an even more wildly successful tech bro for his blessings and budgets to sustain their fiscal dreams.

Why read one detective story, when you could have eight? Coming in 5th Place on Review Season for our 2023 Recommendations is Alex Pavesi, with his debut mystery novel ‘Eight Detectives’. Released in 2020, the novel takes Alex’s background in mathematics, and questions the numerical principles that define the genre, except, that’s not quite the whole story.

To follow up the historical supernatural mayhem that is the Chinese Gold Murders I couldn’t think of a more opposite yet familiar companion novel than our sixth place winner. I’m proud to grant G.K Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown this position in our rankings. Father Brown is a detective who we’ve had literally tens of requests to cover, and that’s pretty high for us. He’s an unassuming father of the cloth, who uses a slow but determined application of observation and light questioning in order to force his suspects to confess their sins. I can’t imagine he’s much fun at parties though. The Innocence is not just one story, but twelve short ones, they vary wildly in terms of complexity and tone.

We’re officially in the upper half of the entries and it is with no small amount of nepotism that I would advocate to you a historical novel for seventh place. The Chinese Gold Murders, by Robert van Gulik occupy a bizarre place in the history of Chinese crime fiction, in that the credited author is as much an author as an adapter of foreign fiction. The myth goes that Robert, a Dutch diplomat on a mission to China, found a collection of 18th century Chinese murder mysteries, set in the Tang dynasty of the 7th century, though with some anachronistic elements mixed in so as to not alienate the audience, and Robert enjoyed reading these mysteries so much that he cut out half of the stories that he suspected had been written by a talentless hack separate to the first half, and set about translating and adapting the mysteries of Judge Dee for a European audience. Judge Dee as a character is based on a real historical figure, and follows in a long tradition of Chinese crime-solving magistrates.