A few weeks back Ramona Depares wrote about book endings that just didn’t do it for her. Which set me thinking about all the things that irritate me in whodunits. And what’s the point of Sundays if I can’t share my bookish irritations with you?

Disclaimer, first: I am a big whodunit fan. Cheesy, comfy, pretentious, formulaic… you name it, I’ve done them all.

It all started of course with the Enid Blyton mysteries, then Agatha Christie and her various Poirots and Miss Marples.

There were also, at one point, a couple of Dennis Wheatley interactive murder mysteries, precursors to those dinner party murder mysteries that were popular for a while a couple of decades later.

I was extremely lucky in my childhood to have had a very special friend: an English lady, at the time representing publisher Penguin, who visited Malta twice a year to promote her books.

Being a very different time, when business relationships extended to genuine long-lasting friendships with the book importer’s extended family, and she being such a lovely person, she became my reading mentor.

To date, I can trace many of my reading tastes to her influence. Very wisely, she guided me imperceptibly away from the Christies, a step at a time: P.D. James and her closed-room murder mysteries, Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski for action heroines (my discovery that action heroes didn’t have to be male), and countless others.

The symbolic culmination was, in 1992, an uncorrected pre-publication proof of an unknown then debut author, Donna Tartt.

“This is coming out in a few months’ time. Read it, I think it will be a game-changer for the genre.” The book, of course, was The Secret History and I still have the now precious pre-publication proof copy in my library.

To this day, we exchange emails every few months discussing what we’re reading, and our reading tastes remain so aligned that she is one of the few persons I take book recommendations from.

So yes, over the years I’ve been through my fair share of whodunits, and in between other readings both leisure and professional, murder mysteries are my safe haven of reading, a welcome and always greatly anticipated pitstop.

Which means that I have quite a few bugbears when it comes to whodunits. One of the key ones – coming back to Depares’s article – is obviously the ending. A deus ex machina, for example, is one solution that is guaranteed to have me screaming: declaring the murderer to be a character newly materialised, whom we’d never met previously in the novel, is not on.

I understand the author’s concern with keeping the murderer’s identity secret and the reader guessing, but the bravura of a thriller author is to hide the murderer in plain sight.

Just magically manifesting a murderer when needed is cheating, both because it amounts to lazy plotting and because it makes a mockery of the time invested by the reader in trying to follow the story and guess.

A good murder mystery should leave enough clues for the reader to guess

A good murder mystery should leave enough tiny clues, hidden here and there, that even if in some cases not sufficient for the reader to guess, they will post facto think back and feel they could, conceivably, have spotted him or her.

Another issue is twists and big reveals. Post-Gone Girl, the unreliable narrator has made a huge comeback in the genre and entire thrillers revolve around constant big twists that keep the reader shifting perceptions and having to re-assess the situation around him. However, for this device to work it really, but really, has to be done well.

Gone Girl has become the standard-bearer of the plot twist, and for good reason.

However, the book industry being what it is means that we have since been flooded with novels claiming to be “the next Gone Girl”. And in most cases, needless to say, they do not live up to the promise.

One such is, for me, The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. It has been billed as the next big thing in the genre, and according to the New York Times – no less – it “has more fun with unreliable narration than any chiller since Gone Girl.”

To me, however, it was one big disappointment. Putting aside the very average writing, if you are going to build your entire novel around the promise of a series of big twists, then the twists had better be good.

There is admittedly a good twist that’s delivered quite early in the novel. But the rest is as predictable as the titular train and, once the author very obviously sets the scene for a next big reveal, it is just a matter of waiting for her to play her cards over 300 or so pages.

Then, there is nothing more to enjoy except for the anticipation of this inevitable twist. Which hardly lives up to its promise anyway.

Red herrings are another stock in trade of whodunits. Which murder mystery hasn’t set up a character only for us to realise at one point that the author was simply toying with us?

Again, done well this can elevate a humdrum mystery into something exciting and suspenseful.

But in careless hands, red herrings become irritating beyond belief. The key is for the author to toy with us, the readers, without it being blatantly obvious that that’s what they’re doing.

And then of course there’s the detective. We all willingly suspend disbelief when the protagonist fortuitously finds himself bang in the middle of a murder, and there is of course a sub-genre of hapless detectives who resolve the mystery in spite of their clumsiness or cluelessness.

However, even that is a skill in itself, writing-wise, and one generally cannot just have a detective walking their way through the novel, one coincidental clue-drop after the next.

Again, it all boils down to respect for us as readers and for the time we’ve invested in getting to know the characters and their backstory.

Apparently a simple genre, driven by conventions, the perfect whodunit is in fact extremely rare. Which is why the few that do make the cut tend to become cult novels. I’ll let you know when I stumble on the next one such.