Word Sleuth

10 terms every crime-fiction fan should know.

- Saptak Choudhury

Very few things can outmatch the thrill of a bonechilling, cold-blooded murder mystery, especially on a rainy evening. We dig into the best of crime and detective fiction and unravel vocabulary that brings alive twisted plots and tropes—and help readers understand whodunnit and how.

ALIBI: Any piece of circumstantial, testimonial evidence or a plot development that directly or accidentally ‘proves’ a particular person was elsewhere at the time of the crime. Often, the culprits are shown to depend on testimonies of the cast to vindicate their innocence, while the detectives must break them down. Think of a culprit who moves the hands of all the clocks in a house to falsify the time of death, or someone who stores a corpse in a freezer and then ‘discovers’ it at a convenient time—estimating the time of death by checking for rigor mortis will be inaccurate and provide the perpetrator an alibi.

TRICK: Suppose a group of people see a person plummet to death from the seventh floor of a high-rise, but they see no one else in the balcony. Adding two and two together, they conclude that the person committed suicide. However, they may have failed to notice the wily trick or setup the culprit used to disguise the murder as a suicide. A trick, then, is a crafty, elaborate mechanism that allows a criminal to commit their deeds while fooling investigators and witnesses alike.