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 contrasted with hardboiled detective stories, which focus on action and gritty realism. Mystery fiction may involve a supernatural mystery where the solution does not have to be logical, and even no crime involved. This usage was common in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, where titles such as "Dime Mystery", "Thrilling Mystery" and "Spicy Mystery" offered what at the time were described as "weird menace" stories—supernatural horror in the vein of "Grand Guignol". This contrasted with parallel titles of the same names which contained conventional hardboiled crime fiction. The first use of "mystery" in this sense was by