S02E02: How mystery writers play with the clock

It's about time.

Image credits: Utsav Mamoria (Tumse Na Ho Paayega)

This flash essay is part of a collaborative, constrained-writing challenge undertaken by some members of the Bangalore Substack Writers Group. Each of us examined the concept of ‘TIME’ through our unique perspective, distilled into roughly 400 words. At the bottom of this snippet, you’ll find links to other essays by fellow writers.

---

In detective fiction, time is often a co-conspirator. Sometimes helping the murderer get away with the crime. Sometimes helping the detective crack the case. And sometimes—delightfully for us readers—helping the writer pull off a clever trick. Here are some interesting ways time is used in mystery writing, along with some book recommendations.

1. Time of Death
When was the victim last seen? What does the pathologist say about the state of the body? Even the most casual readers of mystery know that this is ground zero for most investigations. If the window is narrow, it’s all about tracking suspects’ movements and alibis. But if the body turns up months or years later—or the murderer has cleverly manipulated the apparent time of death—we’re in trickier (and more fun) territory. Agatha Christie excelled at this.

Recommendations: After the Funeral, Evil Under the Sun, The Murder at the Vicarage.

2. Timing the Murder
Booby traps set to fall as the victim passes underneath. Orchestrated distractions that ensure a room full of witnesses don’t realize someone is being killed right in front of them. Murderers, like magicians, often rely on timing and misdirection to stump us.

Recommendations: Sparkling Cyanide, Death on the Nile, The Great Merlini.

3. Time as Setting
The time period of the mystery offers both constraints and opportunities to the writer. For instance, the pea-souper fogs of Victorian London and fashionably large hats that conveniently obscured faces helped the plots of Golden Age mysteries. Closer home, the Feluda mysteries reflected Bengali middle-class society in pre-liberalization India. Both historical mysteries, like Phryne Fisher and futuristic ones like The Last Policeman, take advantage of this to add interest.

4. Racing Against Time
Some mysteries hinge on a ticking clock: a killer who taunts the detective or offers a deadline before the next strike. Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders comes to mind, as does this interesting list of thrillers.

5. Non-Linear Narratives
Agatha Christie wrote a Rashomon-like story of murder in retrospect to great success in 1942 and with much less success 30 years later. Since then, we’ve had shifting timelines and even fantastic time loops.

Given how popular the genre has recently become, I think we can expect mystery writers to keep attempting new tricks with time. At this very moment, on a computer somewhere, a corpse is probably being discovered for the first time in 40 years. A time-travelling witness arrives at the scene ten minutes before the crime.

And in a few chapters, the detective will realize that the criminal mastermind is an AI trained on a century of locked-room puzzles, unbreakable alibis, and ways to hoodwink forensics.

I’d read that.

---

Discover writings on TIME by my fellow writers:

• Keeping Time by Reshma Apte, Fanciful Senorita

• “So… When will shit actually hit the fan?” by Sailee, Sunny climate Stormy climate

• Locating Myself In The Map of Time by Priyanka Sacheti, A Home For Homeless Thoughts

• How long is twenty years? by Richa Vadini Singh, Here’s What I Think

• Time: I Just Want to See It, Watch It Move by Abhishek Singh, The Comic Dreamer

• Timekeepers - Retracing the Universe’s Deep-Time Signatures by Devayani Khare, Geosophy

• The endless ebb and flow of Time by Siddarth RG, Siddarth’s Newsletter

• “Tata Mummy Tata” by Rakhi Anil, Rakhi’s Substack

• What keeps the fool in me delighted by Rahul Singh, Mehfil

• Time, please! by Shaili Desai - Litcurry

• The vicious cycle of sixteen - A dancer’s take on keeping time by Eshna Benegal, The Deep Cut

• The Thing We Pretend To Understand by Avinash Shenoy, OfftheWalls

• The lost intimacy with time by Siddharth Batra, Siddharth’s substack

• Lessons Time Taught Me by Aryan Kavan Gowda, Wonderings of a Wanderer

• A Time for Worship by Vaibhav Gupta, Thorough and Unkempt

• TIME INFLATED, JUSTICE DEFLATED. by Lavina G, The Nexus Terrain