Closed circle of suspects

In Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, a murder occurs among a group of strangers in a house on an isolated island.

The closed circle of suspects is a common element of detective fiction, and the subgenre that employs it can be referred to as the closed circle mystery.[1][2][3] Less precisely, this subgenre – works with the closed circle literary device – is simply known as the "classic", "traditional" or "cozy" detective fiction.[4][5]

It refers to a situation in which for a given crime (usually a murder), there is a quickly established, limited number of suspects, each with credible means, motive, and opportunity.[1][2][6][7] In other words, it is known that the criminal is one of the people present at or nearby the scene, and the crime could not have been committed by some outsider.[3][8] The detective has to solve the crime, figuring out the criminal from this pool of suspects, rather than searching for an entirely unknown perpetrator.[1][3]

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  3. ^ a b c Cite error: The named reference Carlson1993-20-21 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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