By Paul Bradley Carr
Has Elon Musk killed the “trapped on an island” mystery?
In the two years since I opened my bookstore, I’ve come to expect fun questions from customers, but this was a doozy. We’d been discussing “And Then There Were None,” and the endlessremote island/cabin in the woods/snowed-in resort mysteries that it had inspired.
The subgenre has survived the advent of mobile phones, largely thanks to the notoriously bad cell reception on remote, murder islands. But now, my customer fretted, Elon Musk has launched his Starlink satellites, meaning there’s no place on earth the Internet can’t reach. Thanks to Elon, at the first sign of a killer on the loose, our fictional victims can just call for an Uber.
One of the reasons I quit tech journalism to open a bookstore is so I never again had to think about the problems caused by Elon Musk and his ilk. But it’s an interesting question: Will there ever come a point when technology makes crime fiction obsolete?
After all, publicly-accessible DNA databases have already wiped out thousands of possible plot points, as have social media and smart phones. Surely even Poirot’s little grey cells are no match for AI.
And yet, after a few minutes’ thought, I was pleased to assure my worried customer that she had nothing to fear. In the battle between crime-writing and technology, the writers always win.
Consider fingerprinting. First used in crimefighting back in 1892, the ability to identify criminals by their digits was as revolutionary (and potentially frustrating to crime writers) as DNA profiling is today. But in 1903, Arthur Conan Doyle published “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” a story involving a forged thumbprint, used to frame an innocent man. The gap between the advent of fingerprinting and Conan Doyle turning it to his advantage is shorter than a fictional detective today solving a mystery using DNA stored on “23andMe” (founded in 2006).
And that wasn’t even Conan Doyle’s first foray into technocrime. In 1898, he published “The Lost Special” about the disappearance of a private rail car and its crew. It’s hard to appreciate today but, in 19th century London, the steam train – especially one traversing a national rail network – was a significantly newer and more disruptive technology than electric cars are today. For a modern equivalent, one might imagine a vanishing Tesla, or a dematerializing Hyperloop.
Much has been written about Agatha Christie’s passion for scientifically accurate poisonings, but she was an early adopter of electronics too. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – one of the greatest whodunnits ever written – the murderer makes ingenious use of a Dictaphone. That device, which destroyed the credibility of aural alibis, was first marketed less than twenty years earlier, making it about as new as Twitter (or X) would be today.
In 1914, the very first commercially scheduled flight took off from St. Petersburg, Florida, and landed in Tampa. Suddenly the world became much smaller, and much more difficult for fictional criminals hoping to evade capture by fleeing overseas. A few years later, Christie published “Death In The Clouds”, a closed circle mystery set on one of these magnificent new inventions (today’s equivalent: Death on SpaceX.)
Or how about John Dixon Carr whose mysteries featured innovations like dry ice (first marketed less than two decades before he used it) and Panchromatic cameras.
Of course the ultimate techno-crimefighter was Columbo. Over 69 episodes, the shabby detectivesolved mysteries involving a fax machine, closed circuit television, a concealed microphone, a remote control gun (itself monitored by a hidden camera), subliminal advertising, and even – in Mind Over Mayhem – an artificially intelligent robot.
What makes those stories so fascinating is that Columbo was a proud technophile, a cop who refused to even carry a gun. At a key point in every episode, we see Columbo express genuine wonder and bafflement at the gadgets he encounters. And we viewers are dazzled too, even knowing that the tech-savvy criminal will ultimately be defeated by human ingenuity.
As a sidenote: In the 1970s and 80s it made perfect sense for Columbo to operate in Los Angeles, then the epicenter of American excess. Today’s equivalent would surely be Silicon Valley. What a pleasure it would be to see a rebooted Columbo marveling at cryptocurrency, or self-driving cars, or even those Starlink satellites.
We may not get Columbo 2.0, but we’re already seeing a new generation of mystery writers embracing tech rather than being stymied by it.
In “The Steel Kiss”, Jeffrey Deaver recognized the murderous potential of the Internet of Things. Ruth Ware’s “One By One” offers a brilliant spin on And Then There Were None, featuring European tech startup founders trapped up a mountain. More recently, Olivia Blacke’s “Killer Content” makes entertaining use of social media (and flashmobs), Richard Osman’s “Bullet That Missed” features cryptocurrency, and “The Sender” web series, released in June, makes timely use of TikTok as both plot and delivery medium.
The advent of AI would seem to present the ultimate existential threat to mystery writers, with algorithms that can solve any puzzle thrown at them. What role does that leave for detectives?
But, if past is prologue, you can be sure AI will open up more plot avenues than it closes. The world of AI deep fakes offers endless possibilities for fictional criminals, as does so-called “agentic AI” which performs complex tasks without the need for input from the user (imagine an agentic alibi!) My own novel, The Confessions, features an AI that decides to expose humanity’s greatest crimes after learning morality from reading Agatha Christie novels. (No spoilers, but The Confessions might also be the first crime story in which an AI is technically a criminal, detective, and victim all at the same time.)
Rather than AI killing the impossible crime, surely it can’t be long until some fictional criminal plans a locked room mystery so ingenious that even Elon Musk’s Grok AI can’t solve it?
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see a modern day Holmes or Poirot show Elon how it’s done.
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Paul Bradley Carr spent two decades as a technology journalist. He was Silicon Valley columnist for The Guardian, senior editor at TechCrunch, cofounder of PandoDaily, and founder and editor-in-chief of the infamous NSFWCORP in Las Vegas. He lives in Southern California and is the co-owner of “The Best Bookstore in Palm Springs.” His latest novel, The Confessions, is published by Atria. More at PaulBradleyCarr.com
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