Since others have already mentioned Asimov’s Black Widowers and Wendel Urth stories, I’ll nominate the greatest mystery Asimov ever wrote: Foundation. He managed to keep fans guessing about where the Second Foundation was for years, even though he explicitly gives the answer at the end of Chapter 1. Now that takes some skill.
Ummm…not so much.
Ignore
But what about the rug? Does it survive?
It really pulled the room together…
There are two Wendel Urth stories I remember clearly, and they both involve murder.
IIRC, which is by no means certain, Tony Hillerman’s The Fallen Man is about fraud. There is a death, but it is accidental, and the crime involves covering it up.
The Gates of Chance by Van Tassel Sutphen. The story is set in New York a hundred years ago and it’s very much like an American Sherlock Holmes stories. I really like this story. There is lots of intrigue, ingenious methods to get people to kill themselves, and an evil organization lead by one man bent on the heroes destruction.
in Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time her detective, while laid up in the hospital, investigates the murder of the princes in the Tower several hundred years earlier. And concludes that there was not actual murder.
No, he concludes that Richard III didn’t commit murder, but Henry VII probably did.
Edward Hoch’s Nick Velvet short stories rarely if ever had murders in them. They’re all about thefts – Velvet charges $25K as a professional thief, but only steals things of little value.
Looking over my copy of Ellery Queen’s 101 Years Entertainment – a compendium of the best detective stories in the genre’s first century, it includes “The Absent Minded Coterie” by Robert Barr, “The Puzzle Lock” (a corpse, but not a murder), and "The Tragedy at Brookbend Cottage (also not a murder).
I have two favorite mysteries that don’t involve the solution to a murder but both are cheats.
The movie Lantana is about the search for a missing woman but is based on a play rather than a novel. Speaking in Tongues was written by Andrew Bovell who wrote the screenplay for Mel Gibson’s latest Edge of Darkness.
And my favorite has murder in it and it is about the solution to a murder, but that murder never happens. Of course it is Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal.
Well, I’ve written two (unpublished) novels, both Mystery/Romance and neither had a murder. The first one had a guy who was into a marijuana grow-op, with a sideline in illegaly breeding rattlesnakes. The second involves the making of a movie and the stalker who’s after the star. Both books are set at a private zoo and have the same characters - except the ones who disappear off to jail, of course! When I’ve completed a third book I’ll start shopping 'em around. I doubt I’ll do a murder though. I think the next one will feature a string of thefts.
This is what I came in to say. The Father Brown stories cover a lot of very imaginative territory, and many of the stories have nothing to do with murder.
Most of the novels by J.D. Carr, the master of locked room mysteries, do feature a murder as the principal crime to be solved, but also feature one or more sub-plot mysteries or ‘impossibilities’ that may have nothing to do with the murder as such.
You and I are remembering that book differently. Doesn’t one of Rachel’s companions kill a bank security guard unnecessarily? I would think, and seem to remember Spenser thinking, that qualified as murder.