LANGUAGE
By Saptak Choudhury
illustrations By Keshav Kapil10 terms every crime-fiction fan should know
V
ery few things can out-
match the thrill of a bone-
chilling, cold-blooded murder
mystery, especially on a rainy
evening. We dig into the best of crime
and detective fiction and unravel
vocabulary that brings alive twisted
plots and tropes—and help readers
understand whodunnit and how.ALIBI: Any piece of circumstantial,
testimonial evidence or a plot deve-
lopment that directly or accidentally‘proves’ a particular person was
elsewhere at the time of the crime.
Often, the culprits are shown to
depend on testimonies of the cast to
vindicate their innocence, while the
detectives must break them down.
Think of a culprit who moves the
hands of all the clocks in a house to
falsify the time of death, or someone
who stores a corpse in a freezer and
then ‘discovers’ it at a convenient
time—estimating the time of death
by checking for rigor mortis will102 september 2019