 According to Tzvetan Todorov, in terms of temporal logic, the whodunit narrative is considered a paradigm for fiction in general because the story unfolds in relation not to a future event but one that is already known and merely lying in wait.Such certainty pertains to the crime and not to the identity of the culprit, who the reader must anticipate as part of the unknown future.According to , the term WhoDunIt was coined by News Of Books reviewer Donald Gordon in 1930, in his review of the detective novel "Half-Mast Murder" written by Milward Kennedy.