Idea #34: Poirot did it

This idea would probably work best for a book, but I think it could work pretty well in comics, too.

Make a collection of short shorties, each of them is a whodunit, each of them starring the same detective. You know the kind: you’ve read or seen Poirot, Miss Marple and tons of other detective stories: In each “chapter” (or short story), your detective stumbles across a murder which must be solved, and he or she manages to do that just before the author runs out of pages.

But honestly, if you apply logic to it: Who’s the common denominator? Who’s the one person who’s always at the scene of the crime? Who’s the common aquaintance of all the murder victims?

The detective.

So, let’s say you go with a ten chapter graphic novel (or, if you want a format more appropriate of the old classics: A ten volume graphic novel). The first nine chapters or volumes each tell the story of a murder your detective manages to solve. Everything makes perfect sense, everything is as it should be in a detective story: The readers can even read along and notice that everything the detective does makes perfect sense, find the clues themselves, and perhaps even solve the mystery before the detective reveals who the culprit is.

In the tenth chapter (or volume)… It is revealed that everything that happened in the last nine chapters was fake. Your protagonist, the detective, was the murderer the whole time. He brutally killed the victims, and then planted clues and stuff like that to make it seem as if the culprit was someone else. At revelation time, he would in some way hypnotise whoever he accused of being the murderer so that they couldn’t deny that they were. And when your readers get to this point of the book, they will go back and discover that there are actually clues in the comic, indicating that the detective was the murderer all along. And that all the victims in what seemed to be completely separate cases were connected in a way. In some cases, the detective could slip away after the murder and go home, pretending he never knew the victim. In other cases, he could pretend to coincidentally be on the crime scene, and since this was a whodunit where that kind of thing frankly happens all the time, none of the readers would see anything suspicious about that.

Because, really. That’s what I always thought about Hercule Poirot. I get that as a detective he visits lots of crime scenes, but why is he so often at the crime scene before the murder occurs? Why does murder tend to happen wherever Poirot goes on vacation? How many murders can one man happen to stumble across by coincidence? No offense meant to the excellent writing of Agatha Christie, but the only thing that makes sense is if Poirot was really the murderer in most of those cases.

And Poirot isn’t the only one. Most storybook detectives tend to stumble across murders all the time, and we never get a logical explanation to why. It’s time somebody wrote a book or a comic with the most logical explanation of them all: That the detective was the murderer.

34 down, 66 to go. More ideas to come later today.