Word: whodunitism
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...Whodunit? Author Gertrude Stein never comes right out and says, and a second reading of her posthumous Blood on the Dining-Room Floor doesn't help much. This curious fling at mystery-story writing by the late expatriate mumbo-jumboist never even admits that a murder is a murder is a murder. And there is no detective in the story to clear things...
...Lady from Shanghai (Columbia) is a piece of sleight of hand by Orson Welles. The big trick in this picture was to divert a head-on collision of at least six plots, and make of it a smooth-flowing, six-lane whodunit. Orson brings the trick...
Unfortunately, instead of letting the sharp-edged facts make his case for him, Kahn has chosen to try to bludgeon the iron-domed Thomas with the most blatant devices available. Consequently Kahn's introduction reads like the first chapter of a fair whodunit and his commentary on the testimony smacks of Norman Corwin at his over-dramatized worst...
...Many whodunit addicts think that a suspect cannot be held for murder unless there is a corpus delicti-"often used erroneously to designate the physical body of the victim of a murder" (Webster). Actually, corpus delicti is the "substantial and fundamental facts necessary to the commission of a crime." Britain's last murder-without-body was in 1934, when a poultry breeder, Thomas Joseph Davidson, drowned his eight-year-old son. He was sent to prison for life...
...Raven (Westport International), a cross between a whodunit and Spoon River Anthology, is an excellent story idea and an extremely good movie. The story: someone in a French provincial town begins writing painfully wellinformed poison-pen letters, signed "The Raven." Gradually, The Raven's malice eats into every chink and crevice in the town's uneasy conscience. By the time the culprit is exposed, the community is on the verge of a collective nervous breakdown...