Ninas and Easter Eggs – The Game’s the Thing! by Alys Cummings

 Who can resist the lure of a hidden message?

Solving things, uncovering an answer, is one of the joys of being human – just look at the vast numbers of us drawn to both murder mysteries and puzzles. 

But there’s something that can be even more rewarding than finding the answer which is, after all, the objective of the puzzle or the end of the story. And that is something that you don’t even need to discover, an unannounced extra that has been hidden purely for the fun of it.

In video games and movies, these have long been known as Easter Eggs. (There is a legend that this arises from The Rocky Horror Picture Show where some of its very dedicated fans have spotted actual Easter Eggs rumoured to have been overlooked in an egg hunt organised by cast and crew – perhaps unlikely given the movie was filmed in the Autumn. It’s more commonly accepted the phrase arose from the game Atari where the developer hid a credit to his own name.) 

For solvers of crosswords, these hidden messages abound – you might find one spelt out in an acrostic at the start of clues, in the letters round the edge of a completed grid, or in the words at the top and bottom, for example. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that for people who love playing with words – and whose cryptic setter names are themselves playfully hiding their true identity - they are a fairly common occurrence. Some setters have regular Ninas – such as Pangakupu who frequently hides words and messages in Māori in their puzzles. Well-known examples from the Guardian include a puzzle from the much-loved setter Araucaria, who revealed the news of his late-stage cancer to solvers in a series of clues. And in 2017 those who solved a puzzle by an apparently new setter called the Sphinx discovered they were in fact completing the same puzzle that featured in that evening’s episode of Inside No.9 – The Riddle of the Sphinx. The setter was one of the show’s creators, Steve Pemberton.

In the world of the cruciverbalist these hidden messages are called Ninas, named after the work of American caricaturist Al Hirschfield, who would hide his daughter’s name, Nina, in the lines of his drawings.

In Murder Most Cryptic, my debut novel combining murder mystery with cryptic clues, the protagonist is called Nina – an allusion for crossword fans to enjoy. And there are plenty of other Ninas for readers to find, if they wish to look for them.

In the crosswords that feature in the novel they are used to give additional information about what happened to the man who collapses and dies in Chapter One. These Ninas help the recovery group at the heart of the book begin to piece together what might have happened. But there are also clues from these crosswords at the head of each chapter, with the word that is the answer hidden somewhere in the chapter itself. These are not part of the plot, just something extra for the reader, a treasure hunt if they wish to take part in it. 

One of my Ninas in Murder Most Cryptic is something I haven’t yet revealed – a message hidden in the names of all seven principal characters. I’d love to know if anyone thinks they’ve spotted it….

Readers of Murder Most Cryptic might also spot references – some more obvious than others – to other crime writers they enjoy. The books of some of my favourite authors appear and comments on a blog one of my characters writes gave some freedom to sneak in yet more allusions that readers may recognise.

This is something that authors who find their written work transferring to the screen may also indulge in - a moment of mingling among their own characters for that other type of Easter Egg, a cameo. Who spotted Mick Herron sitting alongside Diana Taverner during a funeral in the latest series of Slow Horses?

It’s a little treat, a surprise, something extra for a mystery lover.

For although a setter or writer can convey a huge range of messages hiding in plain sight, the vital thing about a Nina is that it is not necessary. The solver doesn’t need to spot it to complete the crossword, it’s simply there because it exercised the setter’s mind and they hope it will do the same for the the solver. It’s all just part of the game.

Murder Most Cryptic by Alys Cummings (Penguin Books Ltd)

Nina is a promising young journalist. She’s also an alcoholic. Once a week, she attends a recovery group in the local church hall. When a stranger walks in one night, the group think they might have a new member. Until he promptly drops dead. The police believe it’s nothing more than an accident. But the group soon realise there’s more to this mystery than meets the eye, when they discover a cryptic crossword clue hidden in the dead man’s pocket – the answer to which is Murder. As more mysterious and threatening clues start appearing in a newspaper crossword, Nina and team must work to crack this cryptic case. Can they solve the clues, and catch a killer? Or will the next crossword spell death for one of them…

More information about the author can be found on her website. You can also find her on Instagram and X @alyseliza

G B Rubin on Murder at Christmas: You Solve the Crime

The Sleuth. The ‘Tec. The Gumshoe. He, she or it comes in every shape, form, nationality or spiritual outlook on life. But they are always someone else. We, the readers, sit there, mentally flipping through alibis, suspecting everyone in sight, and muttering: ‘Come on, it’s obvious!’ at the hapless sergeant who misses the crucial clue. Reading a good whodunit has always been a participatory sport.

So, what happens when we make that impulse literal? When the reader really does get to decide which lead to follow, which suspect to interrogate, and which risk to take - even if it means ending up as the next corpse?

That question sat at the heart of my new book, Murder at Christmas – You Solve the Crime. It’s a nod to the Choose Your Own Adventure paperbacks that once lined the floor of every kid’s bedroom. I wanted to bring that same sense of playful peril - the thrill of ‘Turn to page 63 if you open the door… page 91 if you run for your life’ - to the world of country house murders and snowbound mysteries. And so, in my book, the reader gets to be the sleuth and direct the storyline – with all the stakes and peril that entails.

Because if you grew up loving those books – and I did - you’ll know the pleasure wasn’t just in surviving the story; it was in deciding the story. You weren’t a passive reader - you were the protagonist, the author’s conspirator, deciding what comes next. And that, I think, is what every crime fiction reader secretly craves: the power to make the call, to follow the clue, to solve the puzzle.

It’s easy to write off nostalgia as a yearning for childhood, but our fondness for those branching paperbacks runs deeper. Life, especially adult life, rarely gives us the luxury of neat outcomes. A good mystery, by contrast, promises that logic and observation can restore order. Add interactivity, and that promise becomes irresistible: if the world’s gone mad, at least the story still obeys rules.

In Murder at Christmas, you’re not just reading about the detective - you are the detective. You can stalk suspects down candlelit corridors, question the maid with something to hide, or take the wrong turn entirely and end up in a very compromising position. Success or failure is entirely up to you (or whoever you give the book to).

That sense of agency scratches a very particular itch for mystery readers. It turns the act of reading into investigation. Suddenly, the clues aren’t just words on a page; they’re potential lifelines. Every decision has weight.

Funnily enough, the more I wrote, the more I realised how naturally crime fiction fits the ‘choose your path’ structure. A whodunit is already a maze: red herrings, blind alleys, locked doors. All I had to do was let the reader walk those corridors themselves.

Of course, there’s a fine balance between fair play and fatal traps. The old Choose Your Own Adventure books were gleefully unfair - you could die on page four because you took a wrong turn in a cave. I wanted Murder at Christmas to keep that spirit of danger but reward reasoning. The sharp reader - the one who notes the offhand comment, the misplaced glove, the suspicious alibi - will find the right path. The inattentive one may find themselves tried for the very crime they were meant to solve.

At the start of the book, there’s a big choice: investigate the poison pen letters at Hurley Court as your pal Algy is begging you; or join your new client Melissa Thresh on a scenic Christmas train, where a magic act turns deadly. Either way you’re throwing yourself into a cast of sly, hapless or eccentric characters and a devilish mystery. Of course, they’re love letters to Christmas country house mysteries and to Murder on the Orient Express.

Setting the book at Christmas felt inevitable too. Yuletide is a time of tradition and ritual - and what’s more ritualistic than the murder mystery? The snow, the candles, the gathering of family (and grudges). The juxtaposition of goodwill and malice is delicious. Christie knew it, and so did every writer who’s ever stranded a cast of characters in a big house with too much brandy and too many secrets.

At Christmas, we crave both comfort and catharsis. A murder story delivers both. The darkness makes the light more precious. And when the reader gets to choose their path through that darkness - to follow their curiosity, their courage, or their folly - the experience becomes personal.

Murder at Christmas: You Solve the Crime by G B Rubin (Simon and Schuster) Out Now

It is 1932. You are Dr Kim Tenor, a Scotland Yard pathologist with a side line in private detection when the boys in blue are stumped. You’re celebrated in the newspapers, but you tend to get the official police’s backs up. You attend the opening night of your friend Johnny MacAlister’s ritzy new nightclub, the Golden Star. While you’re there, Johnny introduces you to his cousin, Melissa Thresh, who is being followed by a mysterious figure, and she asks if you can find out what's happening. But you have also promised Algy Hurley to go down to the family seat, Hurley Court, where some strange events have been occurring. If you help Melissa, you’re caught up in a mystery on a train that involves a seemingly impossible murder. If it’s Hurley Court, it’s a Christmas-set country house murder involving an old family ritual and a silver dagger. What would you choose?

 G. B. Rubin is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Turnglass and Holmes and Moriarty.

More information about G B Rubin can be found on his website. He can also be found on X @GarethRubin and on Facebook.

Even More Killer Puzzles – The Further Return of Murdle

For all you puzzle enthusiasts that fell in love with volume 1 and volume 2 of Murdle you will be pleased to know that there will be a third volume of these exceedingly fiendish puzzles being released in May 2024.

G T Karber will be appearing this year at CrimeFest where he will be hosting a special Murdle event on CrimeFest's opening night. 

He will also take part in a panel on Columbo, alongside fellow aficionados of the iconic TV show, Laura Lippman, and Vaseem Khan, chair of the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA)

There will also be another X competition taking place to celebrate the launch of the third volume so do look out for a tweet about the competition on X.

G.T Karber’s third instalment, Murdle: Even More Killer Puzzles is published on 9 May by Souvenir Press.

The Unexpected Star of the Show by Sharon Bolton

In July 2015, a car veered off the road near Stirling in Scotland. The driver was killed on impact; his passenger, a young woman, was trapped in the car, badly injured, for three days. She died in hospital shortly after police, finally, found the vehicle. It’s a dreadful story, one that remained with me for a long time. We expect, on our relatively small island, that when we need them, emergency services will be there. On this occasion, something went badly wrong.

Books often begin with a simple, if disturbing, idea and trying to imagine what the poor woman went through as she waited for help to arrive was the start of The Fake Wife. In my story, Olive Anderson, dining alone in a north-eastern hotel shortly before Christmas, is surprised by the arrival of a glamorous stranger who joins her, pretending to be her wife. What starts as an alluring game quickly turns dangerous and Olive is forced to leave the hotel with the stranger, driving into a heavy snowstorm. A split-second’s loss of concentration and the car leaves the road; both women are hurt and snow quickly covers their tracks. 

I like to think of The Fake Wife as my Russian Dolls book: each mystery unfolds to reveal another, deeper puzzle and only as we learn more about the characters at its heart – Olive, her MP husband Michael, the Stranger, Michael’s first wife Eloise, and the elusive and mysterious Maddy, do we start to glimpse the deadly game these people are playing. 

Well, that’s how the book should have panned out. Pretty soon, though, something else kicked in…

The Fake Wife was conceived as a thriller packed full of puzzles, psychological, but with plenty of pacy action along the way. What it wasn’t supposed to be was a police procedural. And yet, as all writers will know, sometimes characters grab a hold of a story and make it their own. As The Fake Wife took shape, gaining flesh on its bones, it became apparent that a character I hadn’t intended to play any sort of leading role was finding himself, increasingly, in the limelight. 

Garry Mizon, a nondescript traffic cop in his mid-thirties, who hates his job and is bored with his life, was supposed to be nothing more than a factotum: a means of getting my narrative from a to b. Garry was there to fill in the gaps, to let my real main characters – Olive, Michael, Eloise and Maddy – shine through. 

And yet, almost from the first chapter, Garry took charge. His personality – awkward, painfully shy but, ultimately, true as steel – shone through. In his clumsy, unassuming, anxious way, he began to dominate the page. He became the character I felt most invested in, the one I loved above all others. Full disclosure now: the team at Orion weren’t sure at first; wasn’t he a bit too – incompetent? Too much of a bozo? I toned him down a bit but clung on to what made this man essentially Garry and as the first proofs went out, I was vindicated. The most frequent feedback comment we got back was, “I love Garry!” Far from merely serving the narrative’s purpose, Garry became the book’s star. (As I write this, proofs are going out to key influencers along with a Garry Mizon winter survival pack and his ‘driving in winter conditions’ Spotify playlist.) 

Frankly, I should have known this would happen. After all, The Fake Wife is not my first rodeo. I should have remembered that when you pack a book with twisty, unsavoury characters, the readers need someone firmly in their corner. Garry is the story’s Everyman, the character with no interesting secrets, shady past or burning ambition. He isn’t particularly good at anything, especially not being a police officer. He has no superpower, no great skill (actually, he has a couple, but being Garry, he discounts both.) In Garry, I guess, we see ourselves, the ordinary man or woman caught up in something extraordinary. Garry’s doubts are our doubts, his insecurities and lack of confidence reflect our own. 

I lost track of this as I set out on the story that became The Fake Wife, concentrating far too much on the ‘glamourous’, much less likeable characters. Had I succeeded, the story would probably have failed. But the muse took charge and the book sorted itself out. 

How does this happen? The truth is, I don’t know. I’m just glad it does. 

The Fake Wife by Sharon Bolton is published by Orion on 9th November 2023. 

You're not who you say you are. But neither is she. Olive Anderson has accepted that tonight she'll be dining alone, without her husband. So when a beautiful stranger appears at Olive's dinner table, telling the waiter she's her wife, Olive is immediately unsettled.  But the stranger wants to talk, and isn't this what Olive wants on this lonely winter night? To vent to a perfect stranger? She's too ashamed to tell her real friends the truth - six months into the marriage they all warned her against, her life is a living nightmare. Perhaps Olive should have asked the fake wife who she's really married to. Perhaps she should have known this chance encounter had something to do with her secretive husband. Because there is a string of missing women connected to Mr Anderson, and by the morning, Olive will be the latest...

More information about the author and her books can be found on her website. You can also find her on X @AuthorSJBolton and on Facebook.

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