The murder mystery has always been camp. The 1980s were simply the decade when the genre stopped pretending otherwise. Because if you think about it, the classic “whodunit”¹ is already absurd: a mansion full of suspiciously glamorous people, all hiding secrets, and dressed like caricatures of themselves, while a detective theatrically explains human psychology in front of a dead body and a bloody candelabra. Nobody behaves normally in a murder mystery, and that is precisely t
