Detective stories
In a detective story it matters what happened, but also who works it out and how. These stories follow the tradition of the classic puzzle mystery — the whodunit —: a closed case, a limited set of suspects and a solution that can be deduced from what is on the page.
The detectives of Enigma 45 are, for the most part, people with another trade. One values houses and examines documents; another is paid to decorate parties with his presence. Each of them sees the world through what they know how to do, and that is part of their method.
Cases by detective
Aristide Valmont
6 cases
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Case 1
Three Things Put Straight
A landslip cuts off a house on a mountain pass with seven people inside it and twelve degrees of frost. In the morning the mistress of the house is found dead in the conservatory, sitting in her chair, and nobody has come in or gone out all night. Aristide Valmont, a court-appointed expert whom the snow has turned off his road, stands looking at three things somebody put straight that did not need putting straight at all.
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Case 2
First the Lamp Goes Down
At the press house there is an October rule that nobody explains: first the lamp goes down and then the man, and never alone. On the night Mercedes comes back after twenty-three years, she goes down alone. Aristide Valmont had arrived the day before… to value the property, and he stays because the cellar does not tell the same story as the family.
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Case 3
Houses Do Not Stretch
Bellabrida is closed off by the fever and the flood has taken the bridge. Doña Casilda Mansilla is dead, and her will reaches the court with a new wafer and one line too many. Aristide Valmont must say whether that line is hers, and he must do it… from the far bank of the river, with whatever crosses on Tuesdays and Fridays in the mail basket. The reader is handed the same papers on the same day he is: a sketch plan, six statements nobody could agree on, and a photograph.
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Case 4
Nobody Counts by Looking
The Charity Clothing Guild of Tornellosa is four women, eleven years of Thursdays and a bedspread of eighty-one crochet rosettes that has just won the Provincial Council's prize. An unsigned letter reaches the court: it says the bedspread was bought… in a workshop and the thousand pesetas were collected by deceit. The court seals the room and sends an expert to rule on who made the work. Nobody is dead, nothing is missing and no door has been forced. But the bedspread has eighty-one rosettes and the room has four pairs of hands.
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Case 5
The House Ate the Staircase
The Círculo Mercantil of Sarnia is opening its new dining room, its electric light and a whole house bought from the neighbours, and on the night of the opening sixty members watch a white shape cross the glass screen at a height where there is no… floor. Before the coffee, a doctor is found dead at the bottom of the well of a demolished staircase. The court sends an expert to say whether the man could have fallen on his own. The door was found locked, the key was found hanging on its hook, and in the porter's book there is no line for the return.
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Case 6
Houses Die of Heat
In December, in Norilsk, the sun does not rise. Block Seventeen has split open from top to bottom, and its tenants know that if the crack is the climate's doing, the block will be declared unsafe and they will finally go to the mainland. A reinsurer… in Zürich sends a Swiss expert who speaks no Russian to say whether the ground gave way or was made to. That night the black purga begins and nobody can go out. Next morning the man who was going to show him something is found frozen in the basement, his arms round a pipe that burns.
Duarte Cabral de Meneses
2 cases
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Case 1
What Is Said Without Fear
A photographer writes to Duarte Cabral de Meneses to tell him something, then asks him to wait until the next day. That morning he is found dead in a cubicle at the spa, in the bath his own ticket called for. Duarte stays on for the eight days he… has been paid in advance, talking nonsense with twelve guests, because nobody lies in the trimmings.
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Case 2
Nobody Is Wrong in Formation
On the night of the fair ball, seven pieces of silver vanish from a case locked with two keys, and by the next day the sergeant has fourteen statements that contradict one another without anybody lying. Duarte Cabral de Meneses was hired only to be… seen in the ballroom. He stays because in a whole village that has the time wrong there is one thing that is never wrong: the mail train.
Other cases
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Nobody Weighs the Way Out
Chronos45 sells trips of exactly forty-five minutes into the past, with a register of entry, a register of exit and a customs desk that weighs everybody on the way back. On Friday nine people went out to the London of October 1934 and eight came… back. Edmund Whitmore, who founded the firm, left the party for twenty minutes and turned up dead in the cellar of an empty house in Fitzrovia. The half hour in which it could have happened is covered minute by minute by seven witnesses, and none of them is lying. Inspector Constance Quayle does not investigate alibis: she weighs what people carry.
The classic whodunit
The formula is old and it still works: a place nobody can leave, a group that knows each other too well, an event that looks impossible. What makes it last is the pact with the reader: no clues hidden until the last page and no culprit out of nowhere. Everything needed to solve the case is said before the solution.
Reading by detective
When a detective has several cases, their page gathers them in a suggested order and says who they are without giving anything away. Each case is solved on its own, so you can start anywhere; the order is there to see the character in different settings, not to follow the plot.
More mysteries
If you are after the mystery more than the detective, mystery short stories covers the whole genre, and all stories is the complete catalogue.
Frequently asked questions
What is a whodunit?
A mystery built around the question “who did it?”: a story that sets up a crime or a puzzle and solves it at the end, with the clues in plain sight so the reader can try to get there first.
Do I have to read the cases in order?
No. The suggested order is the order of publication, but each case stands on its own.