There’s something oddly comforting about a good murder mystery.
Not the act itself, of course, but the untangling of it. The quiet, steady peeling back of layers. The questions: who, how, why? I’ve always been drawn to stories that ask the right questions, and murder mysteries never stop asking them.
At their core, mysteries are puzzles. But unlike sudoku (more on that in a moment), these puzzles breathe. They lie. They panic. They betray. And that’s exactly what makes them so fascinating.
As someone who’s autistic, I find real joy in structure and logic. Give me something to sort, something to decode, and I’ll likely lose hours in happy focus. That’s where sudoku comes in. Honestly, I love it. It calms my brain in a way few things do. It’s not just the numbers, it’s the challenge, the patterns, the satisfaction of putting everything in its right place. And how appropriate is Killer Sudoku? I mean, come on. That’s basically the perfect brain warm-up for a murder mystery writer.
There’s something about the genre that works so beautifully with the way my neurodivergent brain operates. I can take apart timelines, spot discrepancies, hone in on a tiny inconsistency and hold it up to the light. It’s a kind of mental detective work that feels almost second nature. Like many autistic people, I process the world through systems, logic, and patterns and those things live at the heart of a good mystery.
What’s also true, though, is that I can get overwhelmed if too many things shout for attention at once. Writing, for me, is a way to calm the noise. I can pick through the plot gently. I can guide it. I can rework and reframe until everything clicks into place.
There’s such quiet satisfaction in that moment when the truth reveals itself. When you look back and realise it was there all along, hiding in plain sight. That moment is gold.
Everything falls into place.