Now they invite us to solve crimes

For a long time, the books of hobbies They have been considered a summer and inconsequential entertainment, even with a stale point. But we live renewed times for exercise notebooks: now not only do self -defined and letters of letters is well seen. The last tendency to enrich the tight section of the hobbies is in the crimes puzzles.

The ‘Murdle’ phenomenon. Behind this current is’Murdle‘, some notebooks with ingenuity puzzles that combine the deductive logic of the classic police enigmas with the immediacy of contemporary online hobbies. Its creator, GT Karber, was inspired by the black novel and game mechanics like ‘Wordle‘, the already massive online game of guessing words and to which indisimulantly refers to the title, but adding a narrative and mystery layer.

How ‘Murdle’ works. The main objective of each puzzle of the book is to solve a murder answering four key questions: who committed the crime, how, where and why. The player receives a series of tracks that must be analyzed and everything is resolved logically. The elements that have given him fame are, apart from that there are all difficulties and, therefore, adapted to all types of audiences, a certain touch of humor and the narrative component of which more abstract puzzles lack.

The result: three million copies sold in 30 countries and the creation of a franchise of which versions adapted for different countries are published. In Spain there are already three volumes of the series, plus a youth version.

More crimes. ‘Murdle’ are not the only books that use crimes as an excuse to propose puzzles and ingenuity games. There are imitators (the planet herself, editor of ‘Murdle’ in Spain, launches ‘Can you solve this murder?’, A ‘Choose your own adventure’ in a police code), but the series ‘Illustrated Crimes’by Modesto García. In each book of the series, twelve independent cases are presented that the reader must solve analyzing illustrations of crime scenes, visual clues and hidden details. It is even more narrative than ‘Murdle’, although not linear, and there is an element of deduction based on concrete elements of the drawings that lose the abstract point, more of a traditional puzzle, which has ‘Murdle’.

A very specific thing does have in common ‘Illustrated crimes’ and ‘Murrdle’: their birth in networks. The project was born during the confinement of 2020, when Garcia, together with the illustrator Javi de Castro, began publishing these interactive criminal deduction challenges on his Twitter profile that he later adapted to the printed format.

The hobbies are the most. The Digital disconnection search And of intellectual challenges that go beyond what the screens offer the screens have marked the proliferation of this new hobbies of hobbies, although we have to look for a concrete guilty, there are very clear names: Blackie Books and its collection of ‘Notebooks‘Of hobbies, created by Daniel López Valle and Cristóbal Fortúnez. Each annual volume since 2012) collects 150 tests of ingenuity, attention, memory and cultural knowledge bathed in pop humor.

Success led Blackie herself to launch similar notebooks outside the summer, oriented to children’s public, sometimes thematic, and editorials such as Larousse, Editions B, Anaya, Blume or SM have launched multiple imitators and notebooks inspired by Blackie’s originals. And within this trend, of course, lies the success of ‘Murdle’.

We like crimes. The perfect storm that ‘Murdle’ has converted and derived from a success is the current fever that we live in the True Crime: Massive series of genre audiences worldwide and the impact of the Internet and social networks, which make spectators in amateur detectives willing to discuss all the details of the cases have been the breeding ground for ‘Murdle’. Yes, of course, we have ‘clued’ since the forties, but ‘Murdle’ would be unthinkable if we do not see us all a bit like the researchers capable of unraveling the details of ‘The Asunta case’ only pulling Wikipedia. Good times for “advisory detectives”, as Sherlock Holmes defined himself.

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