I thought of this and just for fun I wanted to throw it out to the Dopers. I tried to come up with the most challenging murder mystery scenario possible, and here’s what I got:
Eight people are out to sea on a fairly small (cabin cruiser) boat. At one point seven of them are on deck all in sight of each other, while the eighth, the captain is below. Suddenly the seven people on deck hear a bloodcurdling scream, and rush down to the cabin. There they find the captain dead, a knife buried in his back. There’s no plausible way that the victim could have arranged to commit suicide by impaling himself on the knife; but then who killed him?
The only answer I could come up with is rather contrived:One of the seven smuggled a trained monkey on board, which killed the captain and then hid again.Can anyone come up with a better solution?
The hidden primate was a human, not a monkey. The initial premise is false; there were nine people on the boat, not eight, and none of them knew about the stowaway. Or maybe one of them did know, and was an accomplice. Either way, easier than going the whole Rue Morgue route.
No plausible way does not equal no possible way. The captain secretely hated the other seven people. He stabbed himself in the back using a competely impausible method that that no one would ever suspect or believe. The other seven people on board will spend the rest of their lives distrusting each other and having to deal with rumours that he or she is the murderer.
Or
The captain was a former spy with many enemies. A foreign country has been using a sub to follow the boat, waiting for the order to kill him. When the order came, an assassination team in diving gear used oe of those underwater jet thingies to sneak up close to the boat. One of the assassins threw a knife into the captain’s back through on open porthole, then swam away undetected.
Or
We can go old-school Agatha Christie style. Everybody killed the captain (he was taking a nap and they each had a hand wrapped around the hilt of the knife) and they are all alibiing each other by saying they were all on deck together.
As it happens, I was thinking of the one where folks hear (a) what sounds like the squeal of a dying pig or something, and (b) furniture getting overturned behind the old man’s locked door as if someone is losing the fight of his life – and a whole bunch of heirs-in-a-hurry bust in en masse to find the knifed body and plenty of toppled stuff and lots of wet blood glistening all over the place, and cue Hercule Poirot’s Christmas.
An alternate solution that one of the people on top killed him, but the only witness who could see him also needed a alibi so he lied about seeing the person who was the murderer.
I know it doesn’t fit the parameter of ‘all in sight of each other’, but if it’s a small cabin cruiser how is that possible unless they’re lined up. It strikes me that not all of them can see everyone, but that at least one person or two may be out of sight of the others.
He let himself fall backward onto a knife embedded in a piece of dry ice just large enough to hold it upright. The heat of his blood caused the dry ice to quickly sublime, leaving no trace behind.
It’s also the best explanation, if one bothers to search for one at all, to the murder in the movie “Murder By Death.” At one point, one of the detectives says, quoting from memory, “If the guy could create all these special effects machines, it should have been easy for him to make a machine that would stab himself in the back.” Another detective dismisses this as stupid. But…it works! It is the best explanation!
Simpler than using dry ice (never a practical contrivance) would be for him to wedge the handle of the knife into the hinge side of the door thus forcing the door to the cabin to be broken down and when it is he falls to the floor and is found there in a locked room stabbed in the back.
It’s also the best explanation, if one bothers to search for one at all, to the murder in the movie “Murder By Death.”
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That’s also pretty much what happens in the classic DETECTIVE #500: shortly before Walter Gibson’s final completed work in the same issue, there’s a cool little story where a private eye gets it in the back at a detective convention. Since it obviously wasn’t suicide, the other sleuths figure, it was probably the guilty party he was currently investigating; let’s solve the big guy’s last case for him!
Twist is, the investigator was (a) terminally ill, and (b) too proud to ask for help – which is why he used his skills to implausibly kill himself, provoking the desired response.
The captain was really 2 midgets - one standing on the other’s shoulders, with the lower one on short stilts. The bottom midget is the murderer.
Motive: the midgets are sea fairing pirates with a twist. They stop in at small towns and offer their services - a scenic cruise around the harbour. Usually this only attracts the town’s wealthiest citizens. The midgets wait till they get out to sea, then divide, and launch a surprise attack on their customers. They kill them, steal everything, throw the bodies overboard, and sail away.
What went wrong this time, is that the bottom midget recognised the voice of one of the guests. She introduced herself to the captain, and the leg midget realised she was a girl he had gone to school with. For years he had a crush on her, and she had always been nice to him. When he realised it was her, he tried to talk the top midget out of killing this boat load - he suggested they just cruise around the harbour, let everyone off, and get paid for their services.
Now, the top midget wasn’t a purely evil man, he had a heart. He might have been willing to let everyone go, but for the fact that his accomplice’s dream girl just happened to be married to…his childhood enemy. Yes, the bottom midget’s crush was married to a guy who had tormented and bullied the top midget for years when he was young. There was no way he was going to miss the chance to get revenge, and he thought killing the man’s wife right in front of him would be sweet…ok, maybe he was a little evil. So the bottom midget killed the top midget to save the woman.
Just by the way, does anyone else on the boat know how to operate it?
