Today’s featured author is a highly anticipated one for me: G. T. Karber joins the Cluesletter to talk about Murdle: Volume 2.
For newbies, Murdle is a murder-mystery themed logic puzzle where you’re given a murder to solve using clues and evidence. Think a one-person version of Clue, or an elevated version of the traditional logic puzzles you may already be familiar with. You can play a free daily puzzle online, or grab the books to play more. I recommend doing both. 🤓
It’s no secret that I’m a big Murdle fan (in fact, my Murdle TikTok recently hit 1 million views! What?!) so it was a real pleasure to interview Greg. Read on for our chat, which covers Murdle, murder, and everything in between.
Connect with Greg on Instagram, TikTok, and his website, where you can play daily Murdles and sign up to join the Detective Club. Grab a copy of Murdle: Volume 2 here.
Hi Greg, it’s so great to have you! Murdle: Volume 1 is a book of murder mystery-themed logic puzzles based on the online daily Murdle puzzle. Can you share a little bit about how Murdle came into existence? Why do you think murder mysteries and logic puzzles work so well together?
It’s great to be on the Cluesletter! I made the first Murdle on a coffee shop napkin for a friend of mine who loves puzzles and murder mysteries, and he loved it. So, I made a program that generated them, and I put it online, and other people liked them, too! One of those people was my now agent, Melissa Edwards at Stonesong. She called me up and said she saw the potential for a book, and she was right! But I think it only worked because I made it for a friend first. If I had tried to reverse-engineer a puzzle that could become a bestselling book series, it would have been impossible. But because I made it for a friend, and he liked it, other people liked it, too.
I think murder mysteries and logic puzzles work well together because mysteries—particularly fair-play whodunits—are already a kind of logic puzzle. You’re trying to deduce the killer with a limited number of clues. One of the great experiences in mysteries is when a small clue implies a great number of consequences. And that mirrors the experience of checking off those boxes in Murdle—“If this is true, then that must be true, and then this must be true, too!”—so I think they harmonize well together.
What I love most about the Murdle book is the storyline, which develops as you solve each puzzle. There’s humor, intrigue, and even a little romance! How did you approach writing the story? What elements of producing the book were most challenging, and what were the most exciting pieces to work on?
Aw, thank you so much! My editor at St. Martin’s, Courtney Littler, really helped me figure out the basic structure of it. We wanted to provide the same experience of the online daily puzzle, while also providing an ongoing story that would be compelling to people who had already done the daily puzzle a thousand times.
I spent most of my time on the narrative. First, I traced out a general arc using a story-wheel structure of the different moods of each section. Then, I tried to fill in the major story beats and twists. And finally, I generated the puzzles. But it was a real challenge to translate it from an overarching outline to 100 unique murder-mysteries! Often, I would let it randomly generate aspects, and then write around that. Sometimes that would lead me in a different direction that was more interesting or unique.
The hardest part of making Murdle: Volume 1 was the timeline. I had to turn it in a draft only a few months after I sold the book. So that was a real sprint! But I had a huge advantage in that the daily website already existed, and people had already told me which parts they liked and wanted more of. And that helped enormously.
As for my favorite parts, I had so many. I made it so fast that I’m only now really beginning to appreciate it. Designing the exhibits was a lot of fun. Discovering Logico and Irratino’s relationship. One thing I liked doing was re-using icons in playful ways; for example, the statue of an ancient god is the same icon as the Oscar. So that was fun, too.
Murdle’s protagonist is Deductive Logico, a logically-minded investigator, who has an ongoing rivalry with the esoteric Inspector Irratino. In your opinion, what makes a good detective duo? What do you love about pairing Logico and Irratino together?
I think contrast is what makes a good pairing, but there’s also some kind of indefinable chemistry that you need. And that is something you just have to discover. When I first made Murdle, Irratino was Logico’s arch-enemy—the opposite of him in every way. But quickly, some of the daily players picked up on their chemistry, and so I started to write them together more often and develop their relationship.
One thing they have going for them is that I believe in both perspectives: I don’t see them as opposites, but as complementary halves of a whole. I think you need to be analytical and methodical, but you also need to be intuitive and impulsive. So, I really like bringing them together.
As part of the Hollywood Mystery Society, you also host a live murder mystery theater performance, called “Murder at Tara’s,” at a local restaurant. What do you love about this live theater experience? What has producing these performances taught you about plotting murder mysteries?
Murder at Tara’s is great. My favorite part is the meal. Tara, who owns the place, is usually the one cooking for the show, and I think she makes the best samosas in Los Angeles. I also get to do the show with some of my best friends, and that’s really a delight. We’ve sold out every performance! Which is something we get to claim because we only sell 25 tickets a show.
The biggest thing I’ve learned from live shows is a sense of what people find funny. It’s easy to think a joke is great until you hear it in front of a crowd. So when you do a bunch of shows, you start to develop an intuition about how and where you can get laughs. Hearing silence after a joke is a horrible feeling, so you learn quickly.
Lastly, what’s on the horizon for you? Can you share insights to future volumes of Murdle, updates to the daily puzzle, and/or anything else you’re currently working on?
I thought about these first three Murdle books very much as a trilogy, and the second volume is very much the weird, spooky Empire Strikes Back one. Murdle: Volume 2’s influences are intentionally strange: the ancient cult of Pythagoras, G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky, and a bunch more touchstones that I think people have never seen be combined. So, I hope it makes a fun, off-kilter follow-up.
I have been working so hard on these books that it has been hard to find the time to do all that I want to do on the website. I have a lot of updates that I want to release. But one thing that I am very excited about is a collection of crossover Murdles with a bunch of other mystery writers. I’m getting to collaborate with some truly unbelievable talents, and it’s just a surreal experience.
Greg—any final thoughts?
Thanks again for having me on the Cluesletter, Manon! I always love reading it. It makes me excited for Tuesdays. (And then disappointed every other Tuesday because it’s the wrong Tuesday and I forgot.)
And finally, to all the detectives out there, a message: GSZMP BLF ULI IVZWRMT!
(A clue from Manon: Visit Murdle.com to decode!)
Thanks so much to Greg for the interview. Sleuths, I hope you enjoyed it! If you aren’t already subscribed, please be sure to sign up for the Cluesletter and get author features like this alongside other mystery goodies, delivered to your inbox every other Tuesday.