Anthony E. Pratt Birmingham that manufactured components for tanks. Working on a drilling machine, he found the work tedious, but it gave him time to think, including about the ideas behind Cluedo. It was during the Second World War that Pratt had the idea for a murder mystery board game. The idea for Cluedo came from his days spent playing musical concerts in country hotels where part of the evening's entertainment would have been murder mystery games. These would involve both actors and hotel guests playing the characters in a plot which involved the murder of one or more of the guests. The
Mystery fiction before the 1800s was due in part to the lack of true police forces. Before the Industrial Revolution, many of the towns would have constables and a night watchman at best. Naturally, the constable would be aware of every individual in the town, and crimes were either solved quickly or left unsolved entirely. As people began to crowd into cities, police forces became institutionalized, and the need for detectives was realized – thus the mystery novel arose. An early work of modern mystery fiction, "Das Fräulein von Scuderi" by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1819), was an influence on "The Murders