My girlfriend Suzanne received a jigsaw puzzle / mystery box for her birthday. It’s part of a series called “Murder Most Puzzling,” where you assemble a jigsaw puzzle and then look for clues in the puzzle to solve a murder.
And we tried the puzzle.
Let me tell you … the puzzle was harder than the murder itself.
I shall explain.
First came the puzzle. It arrives in a book-shaped box.
So right off the bat … we’re working with a jigsaw puzzle whose image is NOT on the box. That means we have to build the puzzle without even knowing what it looks like.
You know the drill. Look for corners. Look for sides. Build them first. Look for anything that has text. Try to assemble that. Suzanne and I worked on this puzzle. And by “worked on this puzzle,” I don’t mean that it took ten minutes.
In other words, we’re going through the box and trying to fit the pieces together. Without knowing what the final puzzle looks like.
Oh yeah, this was a challenge.
And as we’re putting the puzzle together, we’re finding texts in some of the puzzle pieces. We can assemble the texts when we find them … but then we’re not sure if the texts have clues in their words, or where they’re connected in the puzzle. And it’s not uncommon for some of these puzzle companies to throw in extra pieces to throw off us puzzle solvers.
But we did what we could – a little each day. Suzanne would work on it during the week, I would come over at night or on the weekends and help out where I could. We used an old shipping box lid to store the unassembled pieces, so they wouldn’t get mixed up with the rest of the solved pieces.
Again … this was a challenge.
And after finding all the texts, we also found lots of faces. Hand-drawn faces. That would at least give us clues as to how to orient the pieces into the puzzle. And little by little, we were able to slip puzzle pieces into their correct slots. A little at a time.
This can be a bit of a brain-stumper, so to help alleviate the stress of trying to squeeze puzzle pieces that we THOUGHT fit into where they really SHOULD fit … Suzanne had one of her favorite TV shows on in the background. One of her streaming channels has a show called Death in Paradise, about a police detective who gets transferred to a Caribbean island and helps solve local crimes there.
Wait, wait, WAIT A SECOND – Is that Danny John-Jules as the policeman in this show? That’s Cat from the Red Dwarf sci-fi comedy series!!
Anyway … after what seemed like weeks … the puzzle finally received its final piece.
Yep. Time for Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot to get to work. Or in modern parlance, time for Jessica Fletcher and Lt. Columbo to get to work.
That being said … we found the killer. And … well … spoiler alert … assembling the puzzle was more of a challenge than finding the killer. So I’m not going to reveal the killer, just in case you get this puzzle and want to assemble it yourself.
Even though I posted the image right here on the blog. Okay, mild spoiler alert. 😀
Still, it was fun working with Suzanne on assembling the puzzle together. It’s simple things like this that can bring two people together with fun and merriment.
And I’ll take that any day of the week.
