Why ever kill the joy of a whodunit?

There is no point in calling a novel a whodunit if readers figure out whodunit pretty early on. In fact, anything or anyone aiding such premature revelations should be branded killjoys of the murder mystery. The human brain clearly relishes being tantalised, otherwise, the genre would not enjoy such enduring popularity. And there is no doubt that Agatha Christie — the grande dame of murder — would not be amused that a bunch of scientists claim to have divined a pattern in her carefully plotted mysteries — and devised an algorithm to detect the killer before her detective. They aver that the murderers in her novels can be outed on the basis of elements like mode, setting, and even language, with cars, trains and country houses indicating a female killer, but boats, planes and strangling signalling male perpetrators.

The very idea that Christie can now be predicted will be likened to the dark day in 2010 when Wikipedia callously revealed the murderous protagonist of her record-breaking play The Mousetrap, a secret that had been kept by generations of audiences — at the producers’ behest — for 60 years. What’s next in line to spoil a Christie whodunit’s je ne sais quoi: an app to carry out what the novelist always exhorted her readers to do via the words of the redoubtable Hercules Poirot — use their little grey cells?