Who Done It
Asimov's anthology offers seventeen varied mystery stories—puzzles and psychology—to instruct readers in detection technique and disciplined reasoning, featuring an author-guessing meta-game.
It is a fundamental human characteristic to seek order in the face of chaos. When faced with an inexplicable event—a puzzle, a broken pattern, a piece of illogic—our brains naturally engage, seeking the underlying truth that restores coherence. This impulse, the need to deduce, is the core engine of the mystery story, and it is the very subject of the curated volume known as Who Done It?
The book contains seventeen distinct short pieces, each contributed by an established practitioner of the genre. By arranging these varied selections, we sought to juxtapose sharply different approaches to crime solving. The volume therefore acts as an exercise in comparative technique, where reading the stories in sequence trains the analytical eye. Some pieces are classically puzzle-oriented, featuring the intricacies of locked rooms, carefully constructed alibis, or small mechanical contrivances that demand the reader’s close attention. Others venture into the psychological realm, presenting crimes that can only be solved through an understanding of interior life, social pressures, or peculiar, often perverse, loyalties. A third group emphasizes atmosphere and voice, where the inherent pleasure is derived more from the author’s moral sensibility and narrative tone than from a single, decisive logical trick. This diversity is entirely deliberate; the collection demonstrates that mystery writing is not a single rigid machine, but a family of mechanisms built from differing priorities: pure logic, profound empathy, linguistic dexterity, or compelling atmosphere.
This is reasoned analysis applied to motive, evidence, and narrative misdirection. These introductions are meant to be pedagogical without becoming cumbersome or pedantic; they are friendly prompts encouraging the kind of analytical attention that the stories profoundly reward.
The contributors are a distinguished roll call of late-twentieth-century crime writers. To understand the structure of the book is to understand the different lessons each piece provides. Let us look at the individual stories as distinct lessons in craft:
1. The Case of the Ironic Grotesque: This story, offered by Robert Bloch, provides a compelling look at how ironic failures of character inevitably lead to unexpected and often horrific consequences.
2. The Lesson in Social Acuity: John D. MacDonald presents a piece focusing on social dynamics, where the crime’s solution is found by sharply dissecting community behavior and underlying truths.
3. The Depths of the Psyche: Ruth Rendell’s contribution is an exemplary dive into psychological depth, demonstrating how the baffling surface of a crime yields only when internal motivations are fully comprehended.
4. Low-Key Procedural Logic: Michael Gilbert provides a precise example of procedural investigation, favoring clear, low-key logic over high drama in arriving at the truth.
5. The Whimsical Off-Kilter: R. A. Lafferty’s story challenges convention with a whimsical, off-kilter imagination, expanding the definition of what constitutes relevant evidence.
6. The Economy of Conceit: Bill Pronzini demonstrates the power of economy, focusing energy on a single, compelling conceit that drives the resolution through compressed scenes.
7. The Quiet Moral Dilemma: Dorothy Salisbury Davis explores a quiet moral dilemma, showing that the satisfaction of the solution is often tied to ethical recognition rather than mere trickery.
8. The Mathematical Puzzle: This piece is built upon the structure of a classic puzzle, exhibiting an almost mathematical tightening of possibility that forces the reader to follow logic rigorously.
9. The Alibi Construction: Focusing on mechanical perfection, this story revolves around an intricate, carefully constructed alibi that demands the reader pay close attention to minor contrivances.
10. The Study of Perverse Loyalty: Here, the baffling nature of the crime is rooted entirely in an understanding of human relationships, specifically the unexpected influence of perverse loyalties.
11. The Pressure Cooker: This narrative examines the effects of social pressure, illustrating how external forces can manipulate motive and effectively misdirect the scrutiny of investigators.
12. The Voice and Atmosphere: This selection’s core pleasure is derived from the author’s moral sensibility and the unique, distinct voice used to frame the narrative, utilizing tone rather than a pure puzzle.
13. The Power of Dialogue: A demonstration of efficient writing, this piece achieves its effects through apt dialogue and highly compressed scenes, avoiding extensive procedural details.
14. The Deceptive Witness: This is a short-form mystery designed to dramatize logic quickly, with the central misdirection mechanism being a witness who, consciously or unconsciously, leads the investigation astray.
15. The Decisive Detail: A valuable lesson in attentiveness, this story shows how a casual technical detail, appearing irrelevant early on, ultimately proves to be the indispensable factor in solving the case.
16. The Dovetail of Method and Motive: This leanly designed piece concentrates on the structural necessity of the mystery form: showing precisely how method and motive must dovetail to create a plausible, satisfying solution.
17. The Intensity of Procedure: Finally, a piece that emphasizes courtroom intensity, showcasing how the structure of legal procedures can sharpen the focus on evidence and consequence.
Layered atop these seventeen distinct exercises is a playful editorial conceit, a secondary meta-game. Readers are not only invited to deduce “who done it” in each short piece, but they are also challenged to guess who wrote it, as the authors’ names are presented as a coded puzzle. This device forces attention onto the authors’ "fingerprints"—their habitual motifs, tonal signatures, and recurrent moral sympathies—turning the casual reader momentarily into a connoisseur of technique. It is, in essence, a tiny school in detection and attribution.
A recurrent lesson running through this entire volume is the recognition that mystery fiction is an art of logical empathy. We are reminded that the solution must not merely be clever; it must feel organic, following logically from character and consequence. If a device is only technically astute but lacks psychological plausibility, it is no better than a conjuring trick. The anthology repeatedly demonstrates that the intellectual satisfaction of an elegant deduction is fundamentally intertwined with the quiet moral recognition that human motives, when seen clearly, explain what once seemed entirely senseless.
The attentive reader will recognize that this entire volume functions much like a compact course: seventeen thirty-minute lessons that, when taken together, amount to a full semester of instruction. Who Done It? does not seek to revolutionize the genre, but modestly and effectively it assembles elegant and varied models that confirm the dual pleasure of reading mysteries: the cerebral enjoyment of a well-formed deduction, and the quiet satisfaction of understanding human nature. It profoundly rewards both the enjoyer and the studious eye.
