Two-minute mysteries

I remember that as a child I used to love reading through those little books of two-page mysteries, where some hard-boiled detective would walk into a crime scene, ask two questions, and solve the puzzle. Then he’d turn to the metaphorical camera and go “how ‘bout you, kid? You figure it out?”

I very quickly figured out that the answer was always the exact same: turn the page upside down and some idiot had written down his mistake.

The funniest bit, however, is what kinds of clues always solve the case. In some mystery about a “suicide,” someone claims they saw the dead man kick over a stool, but you couldn’t see a stool from where the man was standing. Clearly, hedunnit. In another mystery, someone claims they heard jingling change, but the dead man only had one coin in his pocket! Hedunnit.

This is ridiculous. Memory (at least mine) is about as reliable as British Telecom, and besides, just because people were lying or mistaken doesn’t mean they’re murderers. Next we’ll read the mystery about the man who saw Bigfoot but really killed Charleton Heston. Or better yet a woman who decides to go cliff jumping is killed by a man who swears he saw her jump from the cliff but he clearly couldn’t because he was in fact tied up and wrapped in an oriental rug stuffed in the back of a Volkswagen hatchback halfway down I-45. These things happen.