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This level of fair play requires significant architecture, and, indeed, Agatha Christie’s notebooks reveal that she made endless lists of possible motives and methods of murder, page after page of the stuff. (Out of context, a horrified reader might think she had stumbled upon a psychopath’s recipe book.)

Genre mysteries (sometimes called “category mysteries”) focus on the mystery: the clues, the witnesses, the cat-and-mouse game the hero/detective is playing with the murderer. They’re often highly suspenseful, often have a lot of menace and skulking around, and may have many elements usually found in thrillers: bombs that might go off, assassinatio