David LeGault
In 1926, a woman disappeared. The story had all the elements of a classic mystery: The woman was wealthy and famous beyond excess, lived in a Victorian manor that spoke to a certain level of British aristocracy; she left her house one evening after everyone was asleep and seemed to vanish from the Earth. Her car was found the next day near a place known as the Silent Pool, a natural spring and a known suicide site. Her car was found with the hood up and the lights on; inside was an extra set of clothes and the woman's driver's license; the car showed no signs of accidents or foul play; the woman was nowhere to be found.
In the days that followed, the largest manhunt in history was underway. Across England, a thousand policemen were assigned to the case. Hundreds of volunteers aided their efforts. It was the first time in the country's history that airplanes were used for search and rescue. When no leads were found, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame was hired as a consultant: He brought one of the woman's gloves to a medium in the hopes of learning something. Crime novelist Dorothy Sayers was also brought in to share her unique skill set, though the only outcome from this was the inspiration for Sayers' novel Unnatural Death. Regardless, the results were clear: Reality was not what could be imagined in a detective novel; not every story ends with a revealing twist, a satisfying resolution.
Cluedo is a combination of the words clue and ludo: the Latin word for play. The board game was originally published under the name Murder! It was created to pass the time during extended air raid drills during the London Blitz. The game asks players to take on the role of one of six characters, to solve the mystery of who killed the party's host: an unseen character named Mr. Boddy. The game is set in a manor in the English countryside, a setting that combines wealth and aristocracy with potential murder weapons. Players must explore the house to discover the scene of the crime, the weapon, and the murderer.
Original marketing used a caricature of Sherlock Holmes on its box, a man with a magnifying glass and a deerstalker cap, but the basic set-up for the game has always been more reminiscent of an Agatha Christie novel: an isolated setting full of suspects reduced to archetype: the war hero, the wealthy heiress, the mistress, the hired help, the reverend and the intellectual. In a Christie story, each of these stereotypes would signify a presumed sense of innocence or guilt: an expectation to subvert. But in Cluedo, there is no backstory or meaning to these characters, and everyone's guilt or innocence is equally plausible, decided at random by a shuffled deck of cards.
This vision of the mystery novel stems from the early part of the 20th century, "The Golden Age of Detective Fiction." It is almost entirely a British construction, the idea of the whodunnit. This genre includes a specific set of circumstances: a single location with a finite number of suspects, each of whom is equally likely to have committed the crime. Though ostensibly about solving a murder, the violence is often minimized: a dead body found without gory description. Murderers do not run when they are accused, but rather they explain the details of how they did it, and why. This take on the genre, putting readers in the position of trying to solve the mystery themselves, catapulted its authors to celebrity status. Authors like Doyle, Sayers, and Edmund Crispin were household names. Agatha Christie is still the best selling author ever, her works appearing in more than 100 languages, selling somewhere between two and three billion copies, only behind the works of William Shakespeare and the Bible. That's equivalent to six Stephen Kings, or four Harry Potters with tens of millions of paperbacks to spare. As the second World War began, perhaps it made sense that these writers and this game would thrive. It's much easier to think about a fictional death than the reality falling out of the sky.
Although the murderer changes in every game of Cluedo, the victim does not. Early versions of the game refer to him as Mr. Black, though all current editions refer to him as Mr. Boddy. Despite the corpse-like name, his body never actually appears: There is a white X marking the spot where his body was found, a staircase in the foyer where players cannot enter. The stairs themselves give a sense of mystery, the idea of a second story full of other rooms to explore. Like the stairs, the X announces that a death occurred, but leaves the rest to the imagination.
Like any good mystery, the clues provide more questions than answers. A letter was written for the woman's husband, a war hero, and left on the kitchen table when the woman left the house. The husband burned that letter, telling the police that it said nothing of consequence while refusing to share its contents. Like Mr. Boddy, the woman was a beacon of infinite possibility. Once she disappeared, it was better for her to stay invisible: the lack of a body leading to hope and possibility, even while the world assumed the worst. The invisible woman was a ghost that haunted everywhere, both alive and not, both hopeless and full of salvation.
Games like Cluedo and mystery novels give the sense that every story is a puzzle to be solved, that it is a reader or player's job to align the pieces. In the world of fiction, there is an order to be quantified, a chain of events to understand. In a fictional world, there is the view of God: able to see the gears that keep it turning, understanding the full sequence of events that let it come to be.
In reality, a nation looked for a woman who was not there, an abandoned car marking her last known whereabouts, no white X's to tell them where to go. In reality, the missing woman was a puzzle without a picture to assemble.
The weapons in a game of Cluedo include a candlestick, a dagger, a lead pipe, a spanner, a rope, and a gun. The original prototype included even more weapons, including a bomb, a syringe, a shillelagh, fireplace poker, an axe, and poison. Interestingly, it is only poison on this list that leaves a body without marking, without a trace of damage.
Poison was the weapon of choice in the Golden Age of mystery, specifically because it fit the theme of murder without violence, death without gore. It was a common occurrence in these mysteries to find a body without any markings of foul play, and science hadn't quite uncovered how to identify them in an autopsy. People often died of natural causes with no clear explanation. Poison allowed the possibility of a natural death, if not for a clever detective's intuition.
Agatha Christie's murder weapon of choice was poison, showing up over thirty times in her novels and short stories. Perhaps this had more to do with her time working in a pharmacy in both world wars, where she gained specific, clinical knowledge of chemicals that showed up in nearly all her work. Cyanide could still be bought over the counter as a pesticide. Hemlock and foxglove could be grown in a garden. She most commonly wrote of arsenic, perhaps because it was so common: used in everything from rat poison to Victorian dyes: people were often poisoned from their clothing, candles, and children's toys. Wallpaper, once glue was applied, could release an arsenic gas that slowly killed unsuspecting families. Austrian women ate small doses of Arsenic weekly because it caused water retention, a "more curvaceous figure." Arsenic was used in cosmetics because it would erase age spots, but enough of it would kill the bacteria that stopped a corpse from rotting. This not only created beautiful corpses for mystery novels, but also served as inspiration for the modern vampire.
In Cluedo, you must find the murder weapon because it is evidence, a step on the way to ultimate discovery. It is common in a Holmes or Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey story for a scene at the end where the brave detective explains what happened, how they knew it happened, and most important, why. In a game where a murderer is randomly assigned, there is no motive to be had, no characteristics to be put onto the game's bland archetypes. And for this reason, it is the facts of a case—the observable truth—that Cluedo must collect. It is only in certainty that the game finds its meaning; it is only in certainty that a player finds satisfaction.
Not every mystery ends in murder; some of our ghosts come back from the dead. The woman is discovered, eleven days later, under circumstances more mysterious than her actual disappearance. She has been staying in a hotel resort under a false identity, that of Theresa Neele. When she is questioned by police, she has no sense of how she arrived or why she disappeared. When her husband was brought in to identify her, the woman believed him to be her brother.
Every game of Cluedo ends with the discovery of a weapon, a location, and a person. And here, in this story, exist all three: The location was the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate, North Yorkshire; the weapon was an abandoned car, a vacant memory; the missing woman was author Agatha Christie.
What is it about a mystery that is so compelling? Is it the way it makes us feel clever, the spark of recognition that comes at its climax? Is it the safe distance it puts between dangerous fears and harmless fantasy, the proximity to a murderer without any of the risk? Is it the comfortable stereotypes where the people are more easily understood, their motives simplified? Is it the way things seem to happen without reason, the desire for a logical explanation when the terrible happens?
Cluedo takes this process and both simplifies and amplifies. Instead of feeling clever, you are a winner or a loser. The safe distance between yourself and the murder is reduced to the abstraction of a body you cannot see. It removes the logical component of a mystery novel and replaces it with clear, undeniable facts about specific objects, places, and people—less of an argument than a mathematical equation. Players are not even stereotypes, but archetypes—reduced not even to a job, but to a color.
Reality never has this level of satisfaction, even when life imitates fiction. Agatha Christie was married to a Colonel who was having an affair. Agatha Christie disappeared to a posh manor in the English countryside, where she lived under the name Theresa Neele, the surname of her husband's mistress. After speaking to police, doctors, and psychiatrists, the reasons for her behavior should have been clear. But even in Christie's mind, she couldn't explain the why of what she did.
Imagine. One of the most famous entertainers in the world disappears under mysterious circumstances. Imagine an entire nation volunteers to take part in the hunt to find her, that her face would appear on the front page of newspapers on multiple continents. Imagine how the world would react to the news that she had been relaxing in a rich spa hotel, that she couldn't explain how she got there. Imagine the level of speculation that would go into her actions, how people would treat this woman who clearly needed help.
Popular consensus said there were two possibilities for what had happened. The police believed that the news of Christie's husband's affair caused her to have a nervous breakdown, that she was operating in a fugue state: a temporary amnesia where a person dissociates from their life when it becomes too much to bear. She may have driven to the quarry with the intent of harming herself, but her psychological state made her abandon this task, get on a train, and end up in a place where she could find some sort of comfort. The media decided she made the whole thing up: that she abandoned the car and assumed the identity of her husband's mistress to draw attention to his affair, or that she faked her disappearance to publicize her (already bestselling) novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. You can guess which theory the public believed in. You have to guess because Christie never spoke of the incident again.
The Golden Age lasted until World War II, when cultural thoughts on death as entertainment shifted, when mysterious deaths lost their appeal. Perhaps it was more about the mindlessness of war: Unlike Cluedo, not every death had a good explanation; not every butler or aristocrat or war hero could hold onto an alibi; there were too many widows and widowers for there to be a predictable archetype; the question of why no longer produced a reasonable answer.
Mystery writing shifted toward "hardboiled" detective fiction: less focus on aristocratic society and more on corruption, mafia ties, and violence. Detectives become problematic antiheroes full of their own vices and flaws. Poisons could be more effectively discovered in an autopsy, so the mystery of poison shifted to the convenience of guns. The books became more violent, more senseless.
Christie divorced her colonel and married a professor. She continued to write novels for another fifty years after her disappearance. Her tone and style never changed, but her popularity endured.
Anthony Pratt, the creator of Cluedo, manufactured tank parts during the second World War. He talked of how games and stories of murder used to be fun, how he wished that fun still existed. While London burned, he made games that reduced death to a smaller scale, one that took his mind off the death above.
Agatha Christie liked it too. Maybe it was easier to deal in fictional people that lacked motive and complexity, in problems that had painless solutions. No poisons needed for these crimes! There's no reason to hide because the killer always gets caught. Christie may have inspired the invention of Cluedo, but years later, in her own notebooks, she referred to yet unnamed characters as Professor Plum and Miss Scarlet, a useful shorthand for stock characters and personalities: for stories that all seem to end in the exact same way.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is considered Christie's masterpiece, mainly for its surprise ending: The book itself is a killer's confession, a first-hand account of the narrator's crime. It subverted the genre of mystery itself, taught us that even narrators can't be trusted. Christie taught that the writer can't be trusted either.
But we want to trust our authors, or at least I do. I want a world with the certainty of Cluedo: where bodies don't disappear, where justice can be served. I've seen my infant child unconscious in intensive care, the diagnosis a disease she'll carry for the rest of her life; I've seen close relationships evaporate due to my own neglect; I've moved my family to a country where I do not speak the language in the name of pursuing a career, resulting mainly in more isolation and uncertainty. I wish my life was easier, that there was a trajectory that made any sort of sense.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the most rational character ever while, in his personal life, Doyle advocated for the existence of fairies and participated in seances. Dorothy Sayers is almost as famous for her writing on Christian doctrine as she is for her mysteries. Agatha Christie may or may not have remembered how she dealt with the most emotionally taxing experience of her life. The only thing I know for sure is that there are times I wish I could simply disappear, a white outline taking the shape of where I ought to be. We take the pieces we're given and do what we can to fill in the gaps: connections made where they don't exist, hidden passages behind sliding bookcases. People create entire worlds in the search of definite answers; This writing here is a small piece of mine. In worlds like these, the right sort of question can bring anyone back; the right sort of question can tell you everything but why.