IT WAS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU THE WHOLE TIME

On the inside back cover, we’re told a murder has taken place, and there are 30 guests who are suspects. Each is carrying a weapon. Many of these are familiar — Katniss Everdeen and her crossbow, Captain Hook and his hook hand, James Bond and his pen gun.

On bottom of every one of the 46 ruled pages through the notebook, there is one line of a poem — each is half of a couplet that’s written across each spread.

One of the first things to notice is that some words are capitalized. If we try stringing the capitalized letters across the left and right sides of each spread, we’ll get jibberish. But if we connect the capitalized letters across all the left-hand pages, and then separately all the right-hand pages, we can get two messages:

Left side: THIS SIDE RHYMES
Right side: THIS SIDE COUNTS

Let’s look at the left side. Some of the phrasing is awkward and forced, which is a clue that there’s a hidden purpose behind the word choice. In fact, a part of each line rhymes with one of guest’s weapons. Some examples:

"If I may beg your pardon, here's to the party tonight!” → GARDEN SHEARS
From deep within the study: "…bangs Rang in my ears!” → BLOODY FANGS
“Fill up your flagon, sip as you learn” → DRAGON WHIP
“Was it a bullet or slash, bite or infection?” → FLASHLIGHT
“Look past this cloaking type of Expression” → SMOKING PIPE

There are 23 couplets and 23 matches. Now let’s move to the right side. The right-hand clue is “This side counts”. How much to count? Each couplet has two lines, and matches to a guest and a weapon. Once we figure out a weapon, we note that guest’s number in the list. We can index into (i.e. count that many letters of) the second half of the couplet. For example:

Page 40 & 41 say “And Yet the stench of sick lingers on the stairs / Surely there's a person out there who cares”
“Sick lingers” rhymes with “Quick Fingers”
The list features "13. Catwoman (Quick Fingers)”
We count 13 letters into the right side (surelytheres**A**person…) to get an A

We repeat this process on all 23 right-hand pages. In book order, this reveals the message LAST LETTERS OF WHO REMAINS.

So, who remains? Note which of the 30 characters did not appear across the 23 pages. There are seven, in this order:

Scout Finch (mockingbird eggs)
Oompa Loompa (chocolate pot)
Miss Havisham (moldy tea)
Scott Pilgrim (guitar amp)
Coraline (thread spool)
Cheshire Cat (wicked smile)
Ford Prefect (Vogon poems)

The message says to take their “last letters”. The last letters of their names spell HAMMETT. There’s no character on our list named “Hammett” but if we look at the final phrase on page 46, we see that we’re looking for “the name behind the one who Slew our emcee.” HAMMETT is a reference to Dashiell Hammett, who wrote The Maltese Falcon, which features famous detective Sam Spade. That’s our killer!

We still need the name of the weapon. Sam Spade carried a Bird Statue but we know that’s not the weapon because the poem says on page 43 "Yet not one of their weapons was used for the kill”. We return to our instruction to take the “last letters”. By doing the same operation on the 7 remaining weapons, still in list order, we get the answer: STAPLES.

Sam Spade is the culprit, and Staples, appropriately, are the weapon. Also look at the illustration of the memo book cover at the top of this page. The body is very clearly the victim of stapling. BTW: Today at Field Notes we have announced another story with Spade as the central character.

Cheers, Sandy Weisz and The Mystery League.