A whodunit is a complex plot-driven variety of detective fiction in which the puzzle regarding who committed the crime is the main focus. The reader or viewer is provided with the clues to the case, from which the identity of the perpetrator may be deduced before the story provides the revelation itself at its climax. The investigation is usually conducted by an eccentric, amateur, or semi-professional detective.
Ellery Queen is a pseudonym created in 1928 by the American detective fiction writers Frederic Dannay (1905–1982) and Manfred Bennington Lee (1905–1971). It is also the name of their main fictional detective, a mystery writer in New York City who helps his police inspector father solve baffling murder cases. From 1929 to 1971, Dannay and Lee wrote around forty novels and short story collections in which Ellery Queen appears as a character.
John Dickson Carr was an American author of detective stories, who also published using the pseudonyms Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson, and Roger Fairbairn.
The "locked-room" or "impossible crime" mystery is a type of crime seen in crime and detective fiction. The crime in question, typically murder, is committed in circumstances under which it appeared impossible for the perpetrator to enter the crime scene, commit the crime, and leave undetected. The crime in question typically involves a situation whereby an intruder could not have left; for example the original literal "locked room": a murder victim found in a windowless room locked from the inside at the time of discovery. 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.
Clan Chattan is a unique confederation of Highland clans. This distinctive allied community comprised at its greatest extent seventeen separate clans, who each had their own clan chief recognized under Scottish law, but were further united and bound to the superior chief of the Confederation for mutual solidarity, sustenance and protection in the Middle Ages and early modern period in the Great Glen and Cairngorms. A tribal coalition of this magnitude was a source of apprehension to both the Lord of the Isles and the Kings of Scots and records exist of machinations to "crying doon the Clan Chattan" by formenting internal dissension.
Madeleine Hamilton Smith was a 19th-century Glasgow socialite who was the accused in a sensational murder trial in Scotland in 1857.
Mary Christianna Lewis, known professionally as Christianna Brand, was a British crime writer and children's author born in British Malaya.
Peter Thomas Anthony Manuel was an American-Scottish serial killer who was convicted of murdering seven people across Lanarkshire and southern Scotland between 1956 and his arrest in January 1958, and is believed to have murdered two more. Prior to his arrest, the media nicknamed the unidentified killer "the Beast of Birkenshaw". Manuel was hanged at Glasgow's Barlinnie Prison; he was the second to last prisoner to die on the Barlinnie gallows.
James Stewart of the Glen, also known as James of the Glens, was a leader of the Scottish Clan Stewart of Appin. He was wrongfully accused and hanged as an accessory to the Appin Murder, the assassination of Colin Roy Campbell.
Margaret Wilson was a young Scottish Covenanter from Wigtown in Scotland who was executed by drowning for refusing to swear an oath declaring James VII of Scotland as head of the church. She died along with Margaret McLachlan. The two Margarets were known as the Wigtown Martyrs. Wilson became the more famous of the two because of her youth. As a teenager, her faith unto death became celebrated as part of the martyrology of Presbyterian churches.
Alfred Walter Stewart was a British chemist and part-time novelist who wrote seventeen detective novels and a pioneering science fiction work between 1923 and 1947 under the pseudonym of JJ Connington. He created several fictional detectives, including Superintendent Ross and Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield.
The Bride of Newgate, first published in 1950, is a historical whodunnit novel by American writer John Dickson Carr, which does not feature any of Carr's series detectives. Set in England in 1815, the book combines two literary genres, historical fiction and the whodunit/detective story and is "one of the earliest historical mystery novels."
The Square Mile of Murder relates to an area of west-central Glasgow, Scotland. The term was first coined by the Scottish journalist and author Jack House, whose 1961 book of the same name was based on the fact that four of Scotland's most infamous murders were committed within an area of 1 square mile.
Oscar Joseph Slater was the victim of a notorious miscarriage of justice in Scotland. Wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death, he was freed after almost two decades of hard labour at Scotland’s HM Prison Peterhead through the efforts of multiple journalists, lawyers, and writers, including Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Peter Britton Tobin was a Scottish convicted serial killer and sex offender who served a whole life order at HM Prison Edinburgh for three murders committed between 1991 and 2006. Police also investigated Tobin over the deaths and disappearances of other young women and girls.
Susan Newell was the last woman to be hanged as capital punishment in Scotland. She was arrested after acting suspiciously and the discovery of the body of a 13-year-old newspaper boy, John Johnston. Although there were no witness accounts of him being killed, circumstantial evidence was presented at her trial. She was found guilty of his murder, a plea of insanity was rejected, and she was sentenced to death.
Detective Inspector Jonathan "Jack" Whicher was an English police detective. He was one of the original eight members of London's newly formed Detective Branch, which was established at Scotland Yard in 1842. During his career, Whicher earned a reputation among the finest in Europe.
Events from the year 1862 in Scotland.
John Gray Wilson QC was a Scottish advocate, writer and Liberal Party politician.
On 2 July 2018, six-year-old Scottish girl Alesha Sarah MacPhail was abducted from her bed and murdered by 16-year-old Aaron Campbell. Alesha, from Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, was three days into a stay with her grandparents on the Isle of Bute when Campbell entered their unlocked home at approximately 2am. The teenager had previously bought cannabis from Alesha's father Robert, who lived in the house, and initially went to steal the drug. Upon finding the child asleep, Campbell picked her up, carried her to the grounds of a demolished hotel, then raped and killed her by applying pressure to her face and neck. Alesha was reported missing at 06:23 GMT; her body was discovered by a member of the public at 08:54 GMT.
