The problem with the murder mystery card game

Okay, it's a complete wash. After playtesting it with people and weathering enough criticism that would make lesser men cry, I can put into words what the problem is.

The impetus of Are You A Werewolf? is the fear of being eliminated. It is visceral and immediate. The impetus of a murder mystery (in general) is the cerebral accomplishment of solving the mystery. To cast a murder mystery in the guise of an easily playable party game is to be at odds with itself. A reason AYAWW works with large numbers of players is that people CAN leave the game.

So, there are two directions I can go: one is to make a more fully playable party game (in which case, the murder mystery genre would be scrapped in favor of a more exciting setting), or it could go into a fully rendered thinking-man's game, complete with roleplaying and/or deductive reasoning clues that would eventually point to the murderer as a matter of logic, instead of trying to divine guilt through social deduction. The current state of what I was working on was to create rules for a cerebral game based on social game rules, and it didn't work.

I want to buy Clue: the card game, to see how that game is played, and see if there is a mechanic or two that could tweak my delight in deduction without reinventing the wheel.

EDIT: Found the rules to Clue: the card game here: http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~jdalbey/308/ProjectReqs/ClueCardGame/ClueCardGameRules.html

 It's similar to the board game: the murderer, the location, and the vehicle are selected and must be deducted by eliminating all other possibilities.

There are some differences I still want in my game: I want the murderer to be a player, chosen in secret. Perhaps this is decided at the beginning or during the game. I'm thinking of a gin rummy type of game: collect the 5 W's (or c/m/o: see last entry) and call gin, or in this case say you are the murderer. Place the cards face down, see if people can guess them? How can this game be something other than just a who/with what/where game like Clue?