Susie Dent, Guilty By Definition (Zaffre, 2024)

There’s been a sub-genre of murder mystery novels developing recently where the setting or context is lexicographical. I’ve posted here on two examples:

Pip Williams, The Dictionary of Lost Words (link HERE)

Eley Williams, The Liar’s Dictionary (link HERE)

Susie Dent is probably best known here in the UK as resident word expert since 1992 on the Channel 4 quiz/gameshow ‘Countdown’. She started her career working on dictionary compilation with the OUP, and subsequently produced a number of annual language reports on new and recently resurrected words.

Her linguistic expertise is apparent all the way through her entertaining first novel, Guilty By Definition. Each chapter is headed by an obscure word – thematically linked to that chapter’s events – with its dictionary definition. Ch. 1, for example, begins with ‘quaesitum’ (17C), ‘that which is searched for’. I particularly liked ‘uhtceare’ (Old English), ‘the anxiety before dawn’.

Other recondite or interesting words crop up frequently in the narrative, like ‘tidsoptimist’ (‘a person who is time optimistic’, ie they underestimate how long something will take) and ‘respair’ (‘a recovery from despair’). Another is ‘mountweazels’ – ghost or invented words that find their way into dictionaries, often as a kind of guerrilla lexicographical act of mischief by bored or capricious ‘drudges’ (as Samuel Johnson famously defined lexicographers – like him); this phenomenon was also a central feature in the Eley Williams novel cited above.

Oh, and there’s a mystery plot in the mix, too. Martha is a senior editor on a dictionary very like the OED whose brilliant, glamorous sister went missing ten years earlier. Whether or not this becomes a murder mystery is an important part of the narrative.

There’s a large cast of characters possibly implicated in this disappearance, and another death takes place once Martha and her work colleagues start investigating what happened to her sister.

It’s all competently stitched together, as you’d expect of an author with Susie Dent’s expertise, and the narrative rattles along comfortably. There are the usual red herrings and convoluted plot developments, but the most fun, for me, lay in the stuff about language and words.

[PS: Another related phenomenon in the world of murder mystery fiction is the celebrity gameshow author; Susie Dent was preceded by Richard Osman, who published the first in his growing list of such novels in 2019.]