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
Crime fiction is Oedipus Rex, in which the search for the murderer of the previous king, leads to the downfall of the current one. Another early example of crime fiction is gong’ an fiction in China, which involved government magistrates who solved criminal court cases and first appeared in colloquial stories of the Song dynasty. The earliest known modern crime fiction is E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1819 novella Mademoiselle de Scudéri. There is also Thomas Skinner Sturr's anonymous "Richmond, or stories in the life of a Bow Street Officer" (1827); another early full-length short-story in the genre is "The Rector of Veilbye"