Hold on to your deerstalkers: the whodunnit is back, with its trail of clues, its lineup of suspects and its well-timed doses of British bloody murder. It arrives when the country is sickly, like a bustling matron, to reassure us that evil will out and that justice prevails in the end. The genre abides by its own strict set of rules. Its predictability has become its USP. “It’s a whodunnit,” says the world-weary narrator at the start of See How They Run. “You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.”
We have long since reached the point where every whodunnit is a whodunnit-this-time, another tour of the same old crime scene. Tom George’s spry, supple See How They Run is smart enough to acknowledge this, with a script that pokes fun at the grinding monotony of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap and a set of characters so schooled in the tropes of the genre that they are practically running on rails.
