You are holding in your hands an almost forgotten classic of the mystery genre.
But while its contemporaries—like Father Brown and Hercule Poirot among them—have become household names, this might be the first you’ve heard of The Baffle Book.
And yet, it’s possible one of the most influential mystery books ever written.
Four years before H. A. Ripley’s Minute Mysteries, decades before Clue, and a century before my own Murdle, Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay allowed you and your friends to test your crime-solving mettle by solving a series of small, puzzling mysteries that they called “baffles.” Its release led to phenomenal success, multiple sequels, and the explosion of this genre of solve-it-yourself mysteries.
When I was a young, I hadn’t heard of this book, but I was deeply familiar with its endless imitators (or, to be kinder, its descendants). I grew up loving mystery puzzle books of every kind, so when I first saw this book, I was stunned by its familiarity and its originality.
The Baffle Book seems to contain almost everything that appears in mystery puzzles after it: diagrams, fingerprints, signatures, maps, and more. And it presents itself, not as a solitary task, but as a parlor game you can play with your friends.
Now, some might find such mystery puzzle games to be beneath the detective story, but I would like to make the case that these baffles, far from beneath the genre, are in fact an embodiment of its highest principles.
And, in defense of my argument, I will turn to no less an authority than G. K. Chesterton, specifically one essay of his titled simply “How to Write a Detective Story.” This way, it doesn’t just seem like the guy who wrote Murdle is trying to argue that puzzles are art. Well, it still seems like that, because it is, but I’ve roped Chesterton into it to shield myself from criticism.
“The first and fundamental principle,” he writes, in his unknowing defense of The Baffle Book “is that the aim of a mystery story, as of every other story and every other mystery, is not darkness but light.”
And surely, this is true! You don’t read mysteries for the part where you don’t understand, but for the big reveal where you do. But with all the red herrings, twists, and misdirections, it’s easy to read a mystery that confuses, rather than illuminates, that makes you think the world is darker and more confounding than it is.
In contrast, in The Baffle Book, and in all half-decent mystery puzzles, you will be given a mystery with an unequivocally clear answer.
“The second great principle,” Chesterton continues, “is that the soul of detective fiction is not complexity but simplicity. The secret may appear complex, but it must be simple.”
We’ve all read books where the killer used two-way mirrors, secret passageways, and identical twins in order to perform the impossible, where the chapter where the detective reveals how he did it is a third the length of the book, and where—once you’ve heard every step explained in excruciating detail—you’re still not sure you understand it.
Sometimes, the biggest mystery is how the culprit managed to plan and execute a scheme so logistically complicated he would need to employee a small army.
Not so in The Baffle Book, or the mystery puzzles that followed it. In a mystery puzzle, the solution is simple, and it reduces the complexity of the problem down to a simple, clear solution. It is more like Columbo than Sherlock, more concerned with letting you feel ahead of the detective than with astounding you with their intellect, and it is better for it.
But off Columbo, and back to Chesterton, who continues, “Thirdly, it follows that so far as possible the fact or figure explaining everything should be a familiar fact or figure”
Here, he’s talking about those mysteries where the clue that opens up the whole case was snuck into the book in the least noticeable of ways. John Dickson Carr parodied this in a later essay of his, entitled “The Grandest Game in the World”: “The whole question of Dagmar Doubledick’s guilt,” declares the detective, “turns on the kind of necktie he was wearing when we met him that day at Wemmerly Park. Of course you remember it was a green tie?”
And of course we don’t, because nobody could!
But again, in a mystery puzzle like those in The Baffle Book, the clues are laid out to you so clearly, and the body of text they are hidden in is so small, that there’s really no place for them to hide. And if you don’t notice that the tie is green in just a few paragraphs, then you should read more closely!
The fourth principal is that any clue in a mystery must have—if it is to deceive the reader—a presence in the story that is justified by the internal logic of the story, because “the instinct of the reader, playing hide-and-seek with the writer…is always to say with suspicion, Yes, I know a surveyor might climb a tree…[but] why did you make this particular surveyor climb this particular tree in this particular tale?”
And this is the challenge of the puzzle constructor above all else: taking the twist of the puzzle and finding the perfect misleading explanation to justify its presence.
In explaining this point, Chesterton argues that the form that a mystery is most related to is a joke. If that’s the case, who prefers a long-winded joke to a short one? Again, The Baffle Book—and mystery puzzles—wins.
And finally, Chesterton concludes, “The detective story like every literary form starts with an idea.”
While we’ve all read mysteries where we suspected that the writer didn’t know whodunit when they started writing it (some writers will even admit this!), it is impossible to construct a mystery puzzle without knowing the solution.
Therefore, I think that, looking over these criteria for a great mystery story, we can unequivocally say that The Baffle Book passes these tests with ease, as do the hundreds or thousands of mysteries which were influenced by this book, leading all the way to the present, and hopefully including my own contribution.
But one final criteria, surely known by Chesterton but unmentioned in this essay, is that mysteries are communal. Reading a book can be a solitary experience, but solving a mystery is easily made into a group activity.
There is a delight to racing your friends to solve the case—or in solving one together—and Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay understood this. They presented The Baffle Book, not as a challenge to your ego, but as a springboard for your parties.
So, detective, good luck solving these mysteries! But be warned, some can be quite challenging! Not only will they require you to use your powers of observation and deduction, but remember—they’re also the product of their time.
Some might rely on common knowledge that has since become esoteric trivia, and if you are hoping for a perfect score, you might be disappointed. But if you think of them as cold cases, then you just might find them riveting (and your knowledge of life in the 1920s might come in handy).
And if you’re not able to crack one of these cases, ask a friend! And if they’re not able to crack it either, then congratulations: you’ve just picked up a new trick that you can incorporate into your own mysteries, like thousands of mystery puzzle books have since.
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