The strange case of the resurgent whodunit

THE THIRD SEASON OF THE NETFLIX THRILLER You ended with a red herring.

- JUDY BERMAN

Fresh off murdering his deranged wife, torching their suburban California home, and faking his own death, serial killer and hopeless romantic Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) resurfaced steps away from the Eiffel Tower. Fans joked that Emily “In Paris” Cooper would be his next victim.

Alas, it was a fake-out. The real action of Season 4 unfolds in London, where the bookish Joe, posing as a university literature instructor, falls in with a clique of posh lowlifes and wakes up with a corpse in his apartment. Upon receiving an invitation to “a night to die for,” it dawns on him: “A circle of privileged suspects, a frame job, and now a cryptic invite evoking a British murder mystery. Sh-t. I’m in a whodunit, the lowest form of literature.”

He’s not alone. A genre that exploded a century ago is staging a timely comeback. Because the term cozy mystery has such a precise meaning, I’ll call them low-stakes murder mysteries; yes, people die, but the mood remains light. The category encompasses true cozies like Kenneth Branagh’s Agatha Christie adaptations, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, and creative, irreverent updates, from Only Murders in the Building and The Afterparty to Rian Johnson’s Knives Out movies. I’d also include Johnson’s throwback howcatchem Poker Face and even The Traitors, a reality competition set in a Scottish castle.

Given contemporary viewers’ seemingly bottomless appetite for gory, exploitative true crime, the resurgence of the comparatively wholesome whodunit might seem unlikely. But pop culture is a dialectic; every overplayed trend makes its opposite refreshing.