Murdle, he wrote! The true story behind the new addictive murder puzzle game taking over Britain

In 2021, G T Karber was living in Los Angeles, working as a screenwriter and maths tutor and, on this occasion, procrastinating. He was in a café and doodled an idea for a logic puzzle on the back of a napkin. 

This, I think, gives you a good sense of Karber's brainpower – I don't know many people who, in moments of procrastination, idly draw up logic puzzles.

The puzzle was a murder mystery, a bit like Cluedo. The player was given a list of suspects, weapons and locations. Then, with the help of clues and a Sudoku-like grid, they had to deduce, by a process of elimination, who had committed the fictional murder, with what weapon, and where.

Karber (the G stands for Greg) sent the puzzle to a friend, who said it was good but that there was a hole in one of the clues. Karber was determined to fix it. At home that evening, he designed a software code snippet to help create the logic puzzles for him. (Again, brainpower.) 

It was a basic piece of code – and Karber would have to add details about the murders himself – but it ensured the puzzles weren't faulty. Then he designed a website, murdle.com, and began uploading his mystery puzzles, for free, every day. The name is a hybrid of the word game Wordle and, naturally, murder.

Greg Karber created Murdle, which has spent 38 weeks on the bestseller list

Greg T Karber created Murdle, which has spent 38 weeks on the UK bestseller list

'I wouldn't say it immediately blew up,' says Karber, on Zoom from LA, 'but a lot of fans of murder mysteries and puzzles liked it.' 

Within a few months, a literary agent, Melissa Edwards, had got in touch to say she could turn it into a puzzle book. His first instinct was to google 'is Melissa Edwards a scam' because it all felt too good to be true.

Murdle was published last June; by October there was a sequel. A third is to be released next month, and last week Karber's publisher announced that a children's version will come out in November – Murdle Junior: Curious Crimes for Curious Minds.

You can see why – Murdle is mega. Karber's book has spent 38 weeks on the UK bestseller list. The first volume alone sold more than 200,000 copies in its first six months.

The success doesn't stop there. Murdle was also the number one Christmas book in the UK. In the week before Christmas, it sold 52,549 copies, beating The Guinness Book of World Records (40,432 copies) and Richard Osman's The Last Devil to Die (33,998). 

That makes Karber, alongside Dan Brown and Michelle Obama, one of the only non-British authors to have topped the UK Christmas chart. (Osman predicted Karber's victory weeks earlier on his podcast The Rest is Entertainment; regrettably, he misnamed Karber as 'G F Kirby', but still, he called Murdle an 'absolute phenomenon'.)

I expected Karber to be a Poirot type, portly, maybe with a twirly moustache, who works out Murdles in a Moleskine. In fact, he's a chatty, funny 37-year-old from Arkansas. 

His Americanness is a surprise: although Murdle is big in the US, its real success has been in the UK. 'That's such a compliment,' says Karber. 'Murdle is a love letter to British mysteries, so its success there is like hearing your crush likes you back.' That said, Karber did recently receive a gently corrective email from a British murdler who noticed one of the suspects was described as an 'MP in the House of Lords'.

Murdle's success in the UK is like hearing your crush likes you back  

Karber really is a fan of British mysteries. He 'barrelled through' 40 to 50 Agatha Christie novels in lockdown. He loves them all but thinks Death on the Nile is the best. He also has a theory that, around the time Christie wrote And Then There Were None, in 1939, she had become so rich that her female detective, Miss Marple, began moaning about high tax rates. 

Now that Murdle is such a success, I ask if there will be Inland Revenue-related grumblings woven throughout Karber's puzzle books. 'No,' he says, laughing. 'I hope not!'

Karber says there are two types of puzzle. The first is 'like a riddle'. You're presented with a clue, 'you're temporarily befuddled and you think about it'. And when you work it out, you have this 'aha moment'. The second is more of a 'labour of leisure'. Think Sudoku – you know how to do the puzzle and you happily work through the process of solving it. 

Murdle belongs in the second category: the puzzles are challenging, but never impossible. I tell Karber that I like doing Murdles while I wait for my tea to brew. By the time I've finished the puzzle, my tea is the perfect strength. 'That's great,' he says. 'I don't want it to be like you make the tea, do a Murdle, then the tea has gone cold.'

Puzzles should not make you feel hopeless, says Karber. After all, 'The most fun Agatha Christies are the ones where you solve the murder just before Poirot.'

A version of this article was originally published on Mail+ on April 24. 

 

Murdle: Even More Killer Puzzles was published on May 9 by Profile, £14.99. To order a copy for £13.49, go to mailshop.co.uk/books, or call 020 3176 2937. free UK delivery on orders over £25.