Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—either professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as speculative fiction and other genre fiction in the mid-nineteenth century and has remained extremely popular, particularly in novels. Some of the most famous heroes of detective fiction include C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Hercule Poirot. Juvenile stories featuring The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and The Boxcar Children have also remained in print for several decades.
Encyclopedia Brown is a series of books featuring the adventures of boy detective Leroy Brown, nicknamed "Encyclopedia" for his intelligence and range of knowledge. The series of 29 children's novels was written by Donald J. Sobol, with the first book published in 1963 and the last novel published posthumously in 2012. The Encyclopedia Brown series has spawned a comic strip, a TV series, and compilation books of puzzles and games.
Puzzle video games make up a broad genre of video games that emphasize puzzle solving. The types of puzzles can test many problem-solving skills including logic, pattern recognition, sequence solving, spatial recognition, and word completion.
A puzzle is a game, problem, or toy that tests a person's ingenuity or knowledge. In a puzzle, the solver is expected to put pieces together in a logical way, in order to arrive at the correct or fun solution of the puzzle. There are different genres of puzzles, such as crossword puzzles, word-search puzzles, number puzzles, relational puzzles, and logic puzzles.
Ellery Queen is a pseudonym created in 1929 by crime fiction writers Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee and the name of their main fictional character, a mystery writer in New York City who helps his police inspector father solve baffling murders. Dannay and Lee wrote most of the more than thirty novels and several short story collections in which Ellery Queen appeared as a character, and their books were among the most popular of American mysteries published between 1929 and 1971. In addition to the fiction featuring their eponymous brilliant amateur detective, the two men acted as editors: as Ellery Queen they edited more than thirty anthologies of crime fiction and true crime, and Dannay founded and for many decades edited Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which has been published continuously from 1941 to the present. From 1961, Dannay and Lee also commissioned other authors to write crime thrillers using the Ellery Queen nom de plume, but not featuring Ellery Queen as a character; several juvenile novels were credited to Ellery Queen, Jr. Finally, the prolific duo wrote four mysteries under the pseudonym Barnaby Ross.
The "locked-room" or "impossible crime" mystery is a subgenre of detective fiction in which a crime is committed in circumstances under which it was seemingly impossible for the perpetrator to commit the crime or evade detection in the course of getting in and out of the crime scene. The crime in question typically involves a crime scene with no indication as to how the intruder could have entered or left, for example: a locked room. Following other conventions of classic detective fiction, the reader is normally presented with the puzzle and all of the clues, and is encouraged to solve the mystery before the solution is revealed in a dramatic climax.
Murder mystery games are generally party games in which one of the partygoers is secretly playing a murderer, and the other attendees must determine who among them is the criminal. In some styles of game, the murderer may be aware that they are the killer and in other games the murderer discovers this along with the other participants. Murder mystery games may involve the actual 'murders' of guests throughout the game, or may open with a 'death' and have the rest of the time devoted to investigation.
The MIT Mystery Hunt is an annual puzzlehunt competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As one of the oldest and most complex puzzlehunts in the world, it attracts roughly 120 teams and 3,000 contestants annually in teams of 5 to 150 people. It has inspired similar competitions at Microsoft, Stanford University, Melbourne University, University of South Carolina, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and University of Aveiro (Portugal) as well as in the Seattle, San Francisco, Miami, Washington, D.C., Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio metropolitan areas. Because the puzzle solutions require knowledge of esoteric and eclectic topics, the hunt is often fused with popular stereotypes of MIT students.
Masquerade is a picture book, written and illustrated by Kit Williams and published in August 1979, that sparked a treasure hunt by including concealed clues to the location of a jewelled golden hare that had been created and hidden somewhere in Britain by Williams. The book became the inspiration for a genre of books known today as armchair treasure hunts.
Treasure: In Search of the Golden Horse is a treasure hunting puzzle published in 1984 by the Intravision production company. It was conceived as a story-based contest by filmmaker Sheldon Renan similar in concept to that of Kit Williams' book Masquerade. The puzzle was presented in two formats, one in an elaborate book illustrated by Jean-Francois Podevin and published by Warner Books, and the other a direct-to-video motion picture filmed by Renan and starring Doryan Dean with Elisha Cook, Jr. in a supporting role. Voice-over narration was provided by actor Richard Lynch with music by composer Jesse Frederick. The film was first aired on cable television and subsequently sold on VHS, Capacitance Electronic Disc, and Laserdisc formats by Vestron Video.
GAMES World Of Puzzles is a puzzle magazine formed from the merger of Games and World of Puzzles in October 2014.
A metapuzzle is a puzzle that unites several puzzles that feed into it. For example, five puzzles that had the answers BLACK, HAMMER, FROST, KNIFE, and UNION would lead to the metapuzzle answer JACK, which combines with all of those words to make new words and phrases.
Wheel of Fortune is an Australian television game show produced by Grundy Television and Sony Pictures Television and CBS Studios International in 2008. The program aired on the Seven Network from 1981 to 2004 and January to July 2006 and is mostly based on the same general format as the original American version of the program. After Wheel of Fortune ended, the format was revived by the Nine Network in 2008 as Million Dollar Wheel of Fortune, until it was cancelled in June 2008 due to low ratings and following arguments from long-time host John Burgess concerning why he did not like the revamped format, which coincidentally was adopted in the United States later that year and has continued with the modified Australian format. The rights to the show are currently owned by Network Ten, which now owns the video and format rights through its parent company, CBS Studios International, which holds international rights as the American version is distributed by the company's broadcast syndication arm.
The Creature of Kapu Cave is the 15th installment in the Nancy Drew point-and-click adventure game series by Her Interactive. The game is available for play on Microsoft Windows platforms. It has an ESRB rating of E for moments of mild violence and peril. Players take on the first-person view of fictional amateur sleuth Nancy Drew and must solve the mystery through interrogation of suspects, solving puzzles, and discovering clues. There are two levels of gameplay, Junior and Senior detective modes, each offering a different difficulty level of puzzles and hints, however neither of these changes affect the actual plot of the game. The game is loosely based on a book entitled Mystery on Maui (1998).
The Egyptian Cross Mystery is a novel that was written in 1932 by Ellery Queen. It is the fifth of the Ellery Queen mysteries.
The Mint is an Australian phone-in quiz show based on the British program of the same name, and broadcast on the Nine Network in selected areas in the late night time slot (post-midnight).
Mystery Case Files is a video game series originally developed by the internal studios of Big Fish Games. Some installments was developed by Eipix Entertainment between 2015 to 2019 and Elephant Games who developed sequels from 2013 to 2014. Now, the newest installments was developed by GrandMA Studios. The Mystery Case Files series is known for its ‘Hidden Object’ puzzles where, in order to progress through a game, the player plays the role of a Master Detective and must find a certain number of items hidden somewhere on a painted scene.
Christopher "Hawkeye" Collins and Amy (Amanda) Adams are a pair of 12-year-old fictional detectives, the main characters in a series of children's novels titled Can You Solve The Mystery?, credited to M. Masters, originally published from 1983–1985, by Meadowbrook Press. The series was republished in 1992, 2006-2007 by Spotlight and most recently in 2013 by Meadowbrook Press as Can You Solve The Mystery?.
Clue Chronicles: Fatal Illusion is a Windows point-and-click adventure game based on the Cluedo franchise, known as Clue in North America. It is a reinterpretation and adaption of the Clue board game as an adventure game including many of the original characters. The game was distributed with a variety of covers, each featuring a different murder weapon.
Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires' Conspiracy is a puzzle video game developed and published by Level-5. It is the seventh main entry in the Professor Layton series and follows a new protagonist, Katrielle Layton. It was released for Android, iOS, and the Nintendo 3DS, in 2017, and for the Nintendo Switch in Japan in 2018, and worldwide in 2019. A manga adaptation of the game drawn by Hori Oritoka began serialization on March 20, 2018, in Shōgakukan's Ciao magazine, and an anime adaptation, Layton Mystery Tanteisha: Katori no Nazotoki File, began airing on Fuji TV and other channels in April 2018.
