Think you could out-Sherlock Holmes or hang with Hercule Poirot?
Author Maureen Johnson and illustrator Jay Cooper are giving readers a chance to solve a murder mystery for themselves with their new “You Are the Detective” interactive whodunit series. The first book, “The Creeping Hand Murder” (out Sept. 16), takes readers back to London circa 1933 so they can decipher clues, decode witness statements and assist Scotland Yard in figuring out the culprit of a dastardly crime. USA TODAY is exclusively revealing the cover and a smattering of inside illustrations.
The book’s a throwback of sorts at least for Johnson, writer of the young-adult Stevie Bell mysteries and “a lifelong obsessive who has always, always wanted to solve a case,” she says.
“As a child, I was given copies of dossier murder mysteries that came out in the 1930s. These were murder mysteries that I could solve. Evidence files. Photographs. Sealed solutions. This was my dream. And I thought to myself, after having written several mystery novels, that I wanted to bring these back.”
In “The Creeping Hand Murder,” poison pen letters have lured seven people with dark secrets to a swank townhouse for a fatal gathering, and unfortunately American novelist Roy Peterman is stabbed in front of the rest of them. Of course, no one saw a thing or went near him, and the most obvious killer is a disembodied hand. So who did it: Was it the poet, the earl, the actress, the cook, the telephone operator or the lothario? And what is the connection between this case and the death of rising stage star Billie Snooks?
Johnson teamed up with Cooper, her partner on “Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village,” on the project. Wanting his illustrated clues to feel authentic to the time period, Cooper researched and sourced antique items from the ’30s for reference, plus bought a bunch of vintage stuff.
“In the case of the poison pen letters, I couldn’t just illustrate them – my lettering is atrocious – or use a font,” says Cooper, an artist who’s worked on more than 25 kids books and designed ad campaigns for Broadway shows. “In the end, I did what any self-respecting scoundrel would: I tracked down and cut to bits a handful of actual 1930s magazines, newspapers and sheet music. All those letters are real, and all those jagged lines were the work of scissors. It was diabolical and old school. And as an avid book collector/ephemera junkie, I’m now guilty of murder myself.”
Keep scrolling for a look at more illustrations from “The Creeping Hand Murder”:
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