Whydunit vs Howdunit - What's the difference?
whydunit | howdunit | Related terms |
A type of detective story in which the focus is not on who committed the crime, but what were their motives for committing it.
:* Connery takes over the interrogation and in the process beats the man to death. This much we know almost from the beginning, so the film is less of a whodunit than a whydunit .
A type of detective story in which the focus is not on who committed the crime, but how they have done so.
:* After half a century, the whodunit was joined by the howdunit , in which the emphasis swung from the identity of the murderer to the method by which the murder was committed.
Howdunit is a related term of whydunit.
As nouns the difference between whydunit and howdunit
is that whydunit is a type of detective story in which the focus is not on who committed the crime, but what were their motives for committing it while howdunit is a type of detective story in which the focus is not on who committed the crime, but how they have done so.whydunit
English
Noun
(en noun)- 1985 , Laurence Urdang, Walter W. Hunsinger, Nancy LaRoche: Picturesque expressions: a thematic dictionary , p 420[http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=E3MYAAAAIAAJ&q=whodunit+howdunit+whydunit&dq=whodunit+howdunit+whydunit&lr=]:
howdunit
English
Noun
(en noun)- 1969 , Ellery Queen: In the Queens' Parlor, and Other Leaves from the Editors' Notebook , p 72 [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZnBSWLVZ29QC&pg=PA72&dq=whodunit+howdunit+whydunit]: