Register Is The Evidence

You have crossed off everyone whose name begins with S. You have crossed off every name with eight letters. You have crossed off two whole pages because a clue said to.

Is that detective work?

WHY THERE ARE NOT FORTY-EIGHT THOUSAND SUSPECTS IN THIS BOOK

Because the arithmetic does not allow it.

If you print 48,000 names and give the reader twenty-two clues, each clue has to eliminate about half of what is left. Every time. And there is no clue about a person that removes twenty-four thousand people.

So those books have to make the clues about the names - the letters, the length, the page. It is the only thing that cuts fast enough. That is not deduction. It is filing.

WHAT IS HERE INSTEAD

14 separate cases. Each has a register of 104 guests, and every guest is a line of evidence:

- who they are - a creditor, a former tenant, the estate solicitor's clerk

- what time they signed in

- which room they were seen in

- what they were carrying

- what they were wearing

- whether they had ever been in the house before

- whether they arrived alone

Which means a clue can be about a person. *The footman is certain no guest in a green coat went past him towards the library.* That removes exactly the people it should, and you can see why.

EVERY CLUE'S ELIMINATION COUNT IS PRINTED NEXT TO IT

Not one of them is zero. A clue that removed nobody was thrown out by the program that built these cases - so there is nothing in this book you cross off for no reason, and no names printed that you never work with.

And no single clue anywhere removes more than 39 of the 104. There is no clue that wipes out sixty pages at once, because a clue that big cannot be about a person.

ONE CULPRIT, AND IT WAS PROVED

Each case was built backwards: the killer chosen first, then every true statement about them generated, then clues added one at a time until exactly one guest was left standing. Then every clue was re-applied from scratch to the whole register to confirm that one and only one guest survives all of them - and that it is the right one.

So when you are forty minutes in, you know the fault is not in the book.

TWO CLUES IN EVERY CASE ARE ABOUT THE REGISTER ITSELF

Who signed directly above the killer. Who signed directly below. Which line. Not tricks - a register is a document in a case, and documents are evidence.

ALSO

- The answer is printed in a simple letter cipher, so you cannot spoil a case by glancing at the wrong page

- Under it, the full chain: every clue and what it removed, so if you got a different name you can find out which clue you read differently

- 248 pages, 6 x 9, and the pages are numbered. All of them.

FOR the reader who bought an elimination mystery, enjoyed the idea, and then spent three evenings crossing out surnames beginning with a particular letter and wondering whether this was really the promise.