Murder by Death

A group of five renowned detectives, each accompanied by a relative or associate, is invited to "dinner and a murder" by the mysterious Lionel Twain. Having lured his guests to his mansion managed by a blind butler named Jamessir Bensonmum, who is later joined by a deaf-mute and illiterate cook named Yetta, Twain joins his guests at dinner. He presses a button which seals off the house. Twain announces that he is the greatest criminologist in the world. To prove his claim, he challenges the guests to solve a murder that will occur at midnight; a reward of $1 million will be presented to the winner. Before midnight, the butler is found dead. Twain disappears, only to reappear immediately after midnight, stabbed twelve times in the back with a butcher knife. The cook is also discovered to have been an animated mannequin, now packed in a storage crate. The guests spend the rest of the night investigating and bickering. They are manipulated by a mysterious behind-the-scenes force, confused by red herrings, and baffled by the "electronic marvels" of Twain's house. They ultimately find their own lives threatened. Each sleuth presents his or her theory on the case, pointing out the others' past connections to Twain and their possible motives for murdering him. When they retire to their guest rooms for the night, the guests are each confronted by things that threaten to kill them—a deadly snake, a venomous scorpion, a descending ceiling, poison gas, and a time bomb. They all survive, and in the morning, they gather in the office, where they find the butler waiting, very much alive and not blind. Each detective presents a different piece of evidence with which they each independently solved the mystery, and in each case, they accuse the butler of being one of Twain's former associates. At first, the butler plays the part of each person with whom he is identified, but then he pulls off a mask to reveal himself as Lionel Twain, alive. Twain disparages the detectives—and metafictionally, the authors who created them—for the way their adventures have been handled. He points out such authorial misdeeds as introducing crucial characters at the last minute for the traditional "twist in the tale", as the assembled detectives had been doing a few minutes earlier, and withholding clues and information to make it impossible for the reader to solve the mystery. Each of the detectives departs the house empty-handed, none of them having won the $1 million. When asked whether there had been a murder, Wang replies, "Yes. Killed good weekend." Alone, Twain pulls off yet another mask to reveal Yetta, who lights a cigarette and laughs maniacally while rings of tobacco smoke fill the screen.

Plot from Murder by DeathCC BY-SA 4.0