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A story — a novel, a film, a TV drama, a stage play — built around the question of who committed a murder, where that answer is kept from you until near the end. The pleasure is the puzzle: clues are laid out, suspects are lined up, and you are invited to guess along with the detective. Agatha Christie is the classic example. The word is friendly and slightly playful, never formal — you would see it in a book review or hear a friend say it, but not in a serious literary essay. It is spelled both 'whodunit' and 'whodunnit'; the double-n spelling is more common in Britain. People also stretch it beyond fiction: a news writer might call a real unsolved case a whodunit, or joke that finding out who ate the office cake became a whodunit. It can be used as a noun on its own or in front of another noun — 'a whodunit plot', 'whodunit fans'.
推理小說；偵探懸疑片（特指「兇手是誰」型的謎題故事）
組成Coined in 1930 by the critic Donald Gordon, from the deliberately bad grammar 'Who done it?' — squashed into one word. The joke is in the mistake: correct English would be 'Who did it?' or 'Who has done it?', and the sloppy 'done' makes it sound like a casual question thrown out at a crime scene.
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
whodunitnoun/ˌhuːˈdʌn.ɪt/
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A novel or drama concerning a crime (usually a murder) in which a detective follows clues to determine the perpetrator.
- Actually, an whodunit is a mystery story. The hero is generally a detective, although sometimes he is a gentleman (apparently a mild mannered worm) who sallies forth at night to become Public Enemy No. One of Crime. Otherwise, the formula is exactly the same as that of the Cliff-hanger and follows the same rules.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。