A story about a crime (usually murder) presented as a novel or play or movie

Usage examples of whodunit.

Indeed, in her more straight-forward detective stories, Josephine Tey often reveals a sort of impatience with the rules and conventions of the whodunit.

We can guess that Tey would have written several more whodunits, but what she would have written is beyond our guesswork.

Disappointingly, the tantalizing whodunit is discarded before the one-third point, leaving only a psychological whydunit that might have been more intriguing before the market was flooded with serial killers, but consummate novelist Rendell can always keep you reading.

He sympathized particularly with a fat woman writer of whodunits, whose extremely unrealistic yet amazingly popular Gray Lensman hero had lived through ten full-length novels and twenty million copies.

Before Detroit native and longtime Boston resident Linda Barnes created her semi-tough female private eye Carlotta Carlyle, she worked as a theatre instructor and director in Massachusetts high schools and wrote two one-act plays and four whodunits featuring the actor-sleuth Michael Spraggue.

Stout's stories are always great mysteries – whodunits, howdunits, whydunits – and they zip along at a pace that would leave the Great Man anoxic.

Although I prefer the English whodunit variety, I have dipped into jaded private eyes, secret agents, and an occasional police procedural.

The storyline was transformed into a tame, conventional whodunit, with all too much footage devoted to pseudoprofound discussions about whether there's a scientific basis to ESP.