Media Watch: Jack Mustard, in the spa, with a baseball bat

From The Guardian (UK):

In 1948, the year the first game of Cluedo was sold in Britain, the poet WH Auden outlined the requirements of detective fiction. His essay, “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes On The Detective Story, By An Addict,” argued that the sleuth should investigate a murder committed within a closed and closely related community, so that all the characters were suspects. Auden recommended the use of maps and timetables, and he favoured a prosperous setting. “The country is preferable to the town,” he wrote, “a well-to-do neighbourhood (but not too well-to-do or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet.”

The original Cluedo game was based on the novels of the golden age of detective fiction, and it conformed to Auden’s precepts. A limited number of suspects are confined in a country house riddled with secret passages and littered with potential instruments of death. The building is shown in plan, like a map, and the corridors are overlaid with a grid.

Kate Summerscale’s article goes on to discuss the rebranding of Cluedo for the 21st century, and the origins of the game at the hands of Anthony Ernest Pratt. Here’s the (literal) money quote: “Anthony Pratt made ‘a lot of money’ from his invention, he said. ‘Some quarters I’d receive a cheque for something like £30,000, other quarters it would be only hundreds and my wife would lament that we weren’t Americans, who’d have made a fortune.’”

Thanks to Brett Myers for pointing out this article!

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