First, Greg Karber’s murder-mystery puzzles went viral - now they are a publishing sensation. The failed scriptwriter from Los Angeles talks to Robert Crampton.
I would never presume to call myself anything so grand as the Times quizmaster. That title belongs to the one and only Olav Bjortomt, on whose daily general knowledge workout I reliably register a distressingly average nine out of fifteen. Nor am I especially adept at crosswords, acrostics or other assorted puzzles. Although I do Codeword pretty swiftly, my wife has repeatedly tried to explain Train Tracks without any luck.
Like Greg Karber, 37, currently sitting across the table from me during his UK promotional tour, the maestro behind Murdle, the internet and publishing sensation, I was, however, a more than decent childhood chess player. And for several years I compiled (or rather, my wife compiled, and I hosted) a pub quiz (with fish and chips included on the ticket) at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. Also, I was an early adopter and advocate of Sporcle, the online trivia site, which I used to enjoy before galloping addiction forced a rethink. So here we are.
Greg Karber’s brain-teaser credentials are rather more impressive. Murdle is essentially a logic puzzle dressed up as a murder mystery, with clues enabling the player to establish the perpetrator, the weapon and the location. It’s a lot like a 21st-century version of Cluedo, or Clue as it’s called in America, but without the colonels and professors, country house setting or quaint methods of dispatch, such as lead piping. It began life as a daily puzzle posted on Karber’s website during the pandemic. The pitch is perfect: “They’re not mind-busting, brain-destroying puzzles,” he says, “but you need to be methodical.” He’s now on to its third book, with more in the pipeline. Sales exceed half a million in the UK; over a million copies worldwide. It’s been sold in more than 30 languages.
The second volume was the No 1 bestseller last Christmas, beating the latest Richard Osman. Despite that, Osman is a fan. Karber is in the UK to collect his Book of the Year prize at the British Book Awards and speaking to sell-out crowds of fans. The puzzles are linked together by a protagonist, Deductive Logico, a detective, and a witty, knowing prose style with masses of up-to-the-minute references.
His typical reader, Karber says, in his hypnotic Arkansan drawl, “are teens and twenties women. I was asked that on the radio and said ‘girls’. I feel bad about that.” I reassure him most Brits are not nearly as sensitive about that kind of slip as they are perhaps in Los Angeles, his home for the past 14 years. As with Osman’s inclusion of ethnic minority characters, Karber features non-binary and gay ones. “I wasn’t trying to reverse-engineer a hit based on the book-buying public — it was just that diversity felt like real life to me.”
The scenarios are humorous, even jolly. Much more Death in Paradise than Scandi noir. A sort of digital, and now printed, Midsomer Murders for Gen Z. From the earliest days of newspapers through Agatha Christie and now on to Netflix and true crime and Karber’s Murdle, the mass market for killing as entertainment never falters. Over the past ten years, more than half a billion crime and thriller books were sold in the UK – 100 purchases a minute. George Orwell nailed our obsession in his essay Decline of the English Murder almost 80 years ago.
Talking of reverse-engineering, Karber’s background, given his success, now looks like the perfect prep for a puzzle/mystery writer. His mother was a judge, appointed by Bill Clinton when he was governor in Little Rock. Later, she became a state prosecutor. Her father had been an FBI agent in San Francisco and later a police chief in Fort Smith, the town in Arkansas where Karber grew up. His dad was on the other side of the courtroom, a defence attorney. “I like to joke I come from a long line of law enforcement on one side and a long line of criminals on the other.”
An only child, a precocious child, his parents divorced when he was young but stayed local and amicable. “I have a lot of friends whose parents ignored them. I was back and forth with mine, and with both the only thing we were doing was hanging out. I was encouraged to follow intellectual pursuits.” Was he clever? “Yeah, I guess,” he shrugs. “I got a perfect score on my SATs [the American tests taken prior to college admission]. That got me a great scholarship to the University of Arkansas. No debt. Study abroad.” If that sounds uncomfortably immodest to British ears, it’s important to stress that Greg Karber is a world away from the stereotypical movie frat boy. He’s self-deprecating, a little eccentric, a little bit country boy in the big city. I like him enormously.
At college, he majored in maths and English. Again, as with his parents’ legal specialisms, it was the perfect combination for someone who would later find his niche as a compiler and mystery writer.
“I don’t think they’re as different as people say. I’d go to maths class and see a really creative proof. Then I’d go to creative writing class and they’d all be talking about how hungover they were.”
Growing up, Karber says he’d yearned to be a sophisticate, so tempered his southern accent and never used “y’all” or other dialect words. “I wanted to be from New York. I was embarrassed because all the jokes are about hillbillies not wearing shoes and your teeth falling out. At school, I was considered a little different. But when I got to grad school [the USC School of Cinematic Arts] in LA — and I was inescapably Arkansan, not from the Upper East Side — I decided it was best to be authentic.”
Shortly after he started studying screenwriting, his dad died, aged just 58. “He was a drinker,” Karber explains sadly. “I loved him dearly. My dad loved westerns. I took a westerns class in grad school the semester after my father died. I went to the professor afterwards to explain how meaningful it was for me, having watched westerns with my dad. He said, ‘Yeah, everybody tells me that.’ "
We share our admiration for the western genre for a while, discussing how the Jack Reacher novels are basically westerns — lone guy rides into town, solves problems with extreme violence, rides off again. I mention Elmore Leonard. “Yeah, I tried to write sparse like Elmore Leonard…” he laughs. But he couldn’t help being funny, ornamental, camp, inventing suspects such as General Coffee, who is addicted to espresso, and Mr Shadow, who “moves like the wind and looks like the night”. There is much other gentle mockery of the detective/comic book crossover.
Karber is obviously steeped in the crime genre. He grew up devouring Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective by Donald J Sobol. “They were pure fantasy for a precocious nerdy child. The cases hinge on a minor inconsistency: ‘How could you have seen the lamp if the light was in your eyes? You’re guilty!’ It would ask, ‘Can you solve it?’ Then you’d turn it upside down for the solution. The coolest thing in the world.”
He adored Columbo as a kid, finding the Peter Falk original via the dire Nineties reboot. “Columbo was my hero!” During the pandemic, he ripped through Agatha Christie’s oeuvre. “I love that drawing room stuff. It became a soothing ritual, a few hours a day with Poirot.” His favourite whodunnit, however, is Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. “Agatha Christie makes it seem like it’s easy. But Umberto Eco you don’t read thinking ‘I could do this.’ The erudition is amazing. It’s a masterpiece.”
Back in LA a decade or so ago, Karber’s own writing career was not going well. “I was never able to get a screenwriting job. I’d written a script which, re-reading it years later, was very bad. Even now, when they send me proofs I can’t open them, I’m never satisfied… Back then, I was very dispirited.”
What kept him going financially, he admits, was his dad’s early death and the sale of his house back home. “That was a huge benefit to me. Without that, I don’t think any of this would have happened. I would have been exhausted every day.” His partner Dani, now a freelance designer, had a steady job. “She worked for Robert Downey Jr as his creative assistant for many years.”
Another legacy from his dad pointed the way forward. “My dad had this quirk, which I now recognise in myself, of becoming completely obsessed with a subject. In the Nineties he read an article about buying domain names, so he bought Karber.net and set up a website, and I’d tinker with it, putting stuff up, some of which would go viral, which in the year 2000 meant a few thousand people watched it. I learnt some programming skills. I’m now an example of a bad programmer — I do what’s called spaghetti code — but it means I know enough.”
So he’d start putting up “little games, interactive stuff, shorts” on his website and YouTube. “Some did well, not enough to make a living though.” He also put on comedy mystery plays at small LA theatres. “I learnt how much information people can take in, how hard a puzzle can be, even for an intelligent person.”
During the pandemic, he took the decision to focus on mysteries. “I’d done all this stuff, sporadically. I wanted to specialise.” He started posting a daily murder puzzle. “People liked it. It caught on in New York publishing circles. An agent called me out of the blue and said, ‘I can sell this as a book.’ "
At this point in the Murdle story, two women, an agent and an editor, become as important as the author. Melissa Edwards, literary agent, “immediately clocked there was value in just doing one thing. I had wanted to do a very different puzzle each week.” Then Courtney Littler, editor, told him “what people want is to do the same puzzle over and over, but with variation each time. I had wanted to make the book very elaborate.” More great advice came from a puzzle guru called David Kwong. “I asked him, ‘Why do people do Sudoku? It’s the same puzzle. Isn’t it boring?’ He said, ‘People don’t want challenges; they just wanna win.’ I made him repeat this. ‘To be commercially successful,’ I asked, ‘the puzzles should be easy?’ ‘Yes!’ "
Karber is not a puzzle or trivia obsessive, but he has friends who are. “The guy I did the first Murdle for, Dan, goes to a bar in LA called O’Brien’s every Wednesday night for a quiz. Everybody in the bar has won game shows. They are trivia geniuses. I had an asset being a regular person.” That said, “If I have a puzzle it eats at me. It’s compulsive. I try not to play video games too much — I get hooked. The Murdle daily people want to do a lot. I’m like, ‘You shouldn’t! Go back to your life!’ There’s something about the screen that invites compulsive behaviour in a way a book doesn’t.”
He once spent 40 hours on one game of Factorio. I tell him I was once addicted to Sporcle, and also developed a problem with Second World War sniper games — something about the sound effect of cocking the rifle. Plus, killing Nazis. “That’s great!” he shouts. “I’m for that!”
He’s enjoying his success, while staying sceptical about how long it might last. “They flew me here first class, which I’ve never done. It was very clear we were the first-timers in first class. They said it’d be ten hours. I’m like, ‘Oh, only ten?’ "
He isn’t rich yet. “Royalties are kinda slow. We’re still in the same one-bed in west LA. My dream is this will allow me to buy a home in America. My agent wants me to write a mystery novel. I don’t know how long this will go on. I’m not the greatest programmer; I’m not the sharpest writer. But if I keep it authentic to me, I think people will still like it.”
Murdle: Even More Killer Puzzles by GT Karber is available in stores now.
Written by: Robert Crampton
© The Times of London