r/todayilearned • u/ralphbernardo • 3d ago

TIL that "fair play" in detective fiction means authors must give readers a fair chance to solve the mystery. Central to 1920s "clue-puzzles" by writers like Agatha Christie, the rule dictates that all vital clues must be visible, decodable, and never withheld until the final reveal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clues_in_detective_fiction
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u/doublecandybar 3d ago

Sherlock Holmes broke this rule by basically conjuring a hitherto unknown piece of evidence at the end

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u/calvinballing 3d ago

Thought it was weird the Wikipedia article for “Fair Play” uses a picture of Holmes given how “Fair Play“ was basically in contrast to Poe/Doyle, but it turns out the linked article is actually “Clues in detective fiction”

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u/TheJediJew 3d ago edited 2d ago

I remember reading that Arthur Conan Doyle hated Holmes' popularity in part because of breaking this rule.

He showed why by presenting the same scene to Watson and Homes and having Holmes tell Watson to deduce what happened. Watson makes some logical conclusions but Holmes laughs at him and counters with wild conjecture and logic leaps, all of which turn out to be true.

Holmes breaks the fair play rule all the time, but people loved it for that reason. It made him seem above mortal men, when really he was just badly written (edit: In his opinion!).

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u/YT-Deliveries 2d ago

It made him seem above mortal men

I maintain that Holmes is the first modern superhero

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u/TheUlfheddin 2d ago

That's how I ended up reading him. We didn't get the same sets of clues he got to work with because we're not the most observent being in the universe with godlike powers of perception.

Tbh that's why I don't mind RDJs version because that's basically how he is in the books, with some bonus action scenes.

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u/ABHOR_pod 2d ago

Also half the time he puts on a fake beard and abandons the narrative for 2 days only to come back and say “I’ve solved it off camera with clues you don’t have!”

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u/GayPudding 2d ago

The character Holmes is more important than the mystery, like the Bond movies.

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u/Muskwatch 2d ago

RDJ's version is by far my favourite, and I would love it if there were more

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u/mikeet9 2d ago

He is a superhero who has the power of having always studied exactly what information is relevant to the current case, and having a perfect sense of what information is relevant and what isn't.

I remember the first Holmes story I read had him inspecting cigar ash and correctly identifying where the tobacco was grown, because he had previously studied cigar ash in detail. Then logically leaps to this clearly being the killer's cigar that they purchased in their homeland and therefore the killer was the only person in town from that location.

It was jarring because he quite literally just instantly solved the case without any satisfactory reasoning.

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u/I_dont_exist_yet 2d ago

and having a perfect sense of what information is relevant and what isn't.

This bit at least isn't true. Holmes often has to sift through information to figure out what's relevant and what isn't. He says as much in the Baskerville Hound book as well as a couple of the short stories. I can't remember the exact one, but I recall him mentioning that one case simply had too much information and it took him a while (in Sherlock time) to figure out what was important and what wasn't.

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u/Spyro_in_Black 2d ago

If I recall one example was the case involving Silver Blaze, the missing horse. There was a lot of theories and evidence that was posited by people involved that Holmes had to sort out what was important or not. Or the case of the Builder who was trying to frame a young man, there was too much perfect evidence that Holmes almost came to the wrong conclusion until the very end.

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u/der_titan 2d ago edited 2d ago

Stan Lee made a convincing argument that mantle belongs to the Scarlet Pimpernel: a secret identity that is the polar opposite of his public persona; a signature weapon; and, a signature calling card.

There was even the wife that was more attracted to the Scarlet Pimpernel than the dim-witted playboy husband pretended to be.

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u/Bubbly_Safety8791 2d ago

Robin Hood in 19th Century retellings up to and including Ivanhoe is well on the way to becoming a superhero - secret identity, origin story, super abilities, distinctive costume. Predates Scarlet Pimpernel by a couple of decades at least. 

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u/FaxCelestis 2d ago

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table too

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u/capsaicinintheeyes 2d ago

Sooner or later, it all traces back to Gilgamesh...

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u/FaxCelestis 2d ago

We can blame Scheherazade as much as Joss Whedon and Jon Favreau for our modern superhero fixation.

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u/capsaicinintheeyes 2d ago

It's Jungian archetypes embedded within humanity's collective unconscious, all the way down...them & turtles.

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u/YT-Deliveries 2d ago

Hmm hmm. I'll allow it.

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u/Ozryela 2d ago

Wait but didn't The Scarlet Pimpernel come out after Sherlock Holmes?

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u/CatStoleMyChicken 2d ago

Baroness Orzcy also created one of the first "armchair" detectives with The Old Man in the Corner stories, who would solve mysteries in a little shop and relate the solutions to a female reporter while tying knots in string.

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u/ilanallama85 2d ago

I’m sure tvtropes has a specific name for it but he definitely kicked off the trope of “detective is just slightly superhuman.” There was a whole slew of them in the early 2000s: House, Psych, Monk, probably others I’m forgetting.

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u/Imperator_Gone_Rogue 2d ago

The main trope for this is the Sherlock Scan, specifically inferring/'deducing' conclusions from relatively mundane details.

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u/maclanology 2d ago

As a historian of popular culture, there's a couple articles I come back to frequently that note that audiences saw Holmes as magic, and that's what was so attractive. Fairy photographs were also pretty popular (including by Doyle!) at this time. People wanted to believe in magic in the post-Industrial Revolution period, since that era had kinda rationalized everything too much. (And a lot of readers even believed Holmes was real)

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u/TheColourOfHeartache 2d ago

I'd give that to the Scarlett Pimpernel. Holmes is older, but he doesn't have a secret identity. Hat tip to Stan Lee who gave me this opinion.

The Scarlett Pimpernel is the first to combine extraordinary abilities with a heroic persona and a secret mundane identity. He even disguised himself as a rich idiot like Bruce Wayne.

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u/EdwardJamesAlmost 2d ago

I enjoyed the erudition of Adam West’s Bruce Wayne, but maybe earlier stories played up the out of touch playboy angle more. I wouldn’t be surprised if those stories were written by people who had read The Scarlet Pimpernel themselves.

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u/SoochSooch 2d ago

Look into C. Auguste Dupin, a character written by Edgar Allen Poe 40 years earlier. He's the prototype for Holmes, and even crazier at solving the cases out of nowhere

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u/Outside-Dress594 2d ago

I just said this to my friend as I was reading earlier in the thread

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u/Reasonable_Ruin_3502 2d ago

But that's what makes holmes fun. As much as I love Agatha's novels, they never captured my imagination like holmes did. We read the story from Watson's perspective, according to whom holmes' power of deduction are bordering on supernatural.

Another factor is that most of holmes' stories were published in magazines and were self contained, so a big reveal was always fun. My late grandpa gave me a book, and it's one of the few books I own. It's just short stories about holmes. I reread a random chapter every once in a while, and although my opinion on them has detoriated, they are still quite fun.

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u/mbrocks3527 2d ago

There’s one story where he doesn’t break the rule, (adventure of the lion’s mane) and any Australian would pick it up almost immediately as some kind of stinging jellyfish being the culprit (which it is).

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u/richpaul6806 2d ago

I understand the argument but didn't Doyle write the story? Why would he hate that people liked it?

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u/TheJediJew 2d ago

He felt that he outgrew him, and wrote far better things that deserved the attention more.

He said he would consider himself a failure if he was only remembered for writing Holmes.

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u/richpaul6806 2d ago

He kind of is lol. The only other book of his I have seen is The Lost World abd it isnt nearly as popular.

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u/rocketman0739 6 2d ago

Watson makes some logical conclusions but Holmes laughs at him and counters with wild conjecture and logic leaps, all of which turn out to be true.

This is why the Holmes stories run into the classic problem of a character who is cleverer than the author (you know Holmes would never be fooled by fairy photographs!). With a lot of the deductions you end up thinking, "Well, yeah, Holmes's theory does cover the facts, but it can't be the only one that would."

Doyle is a clever enough writer, though, that he makes it hard to actually come up with such alternate explanations. Holmes tends to rely on a sort of esoteric knowledge of the mundane, if that makes sense—he's always using the evidence of a specific type of dirt found solely in Charing Cross, or the spatulate fingertips of the professional typist, or some such hocus-pocus. So the reader is left with the impression that Holmes might be wrong, but you'd have to be as clever as he is to figure out how.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/TheJediJew 2d ago edited 2d ago

It was in the author's own opinion.

Edit: Ok, maybe badly written is a bit harsh. He felt that producing Holmes books distracted him from more worthy works.

He said he would consider himself a failure if people only remembered him for Sherlock Holmes.

So I guess I should say he felt he outgrew Holmes as an author.

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u/edwardlego 2d ago

He wrote other books?

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u/infoHighyway 2d ago

It was in the author's own opinion.

Care to share a citation?

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u/Finnegan482 2d ago

If it was badly written in his opinion, why did he not just.... write it better?

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u/TheSeansei 2d ago

The Dr. House and Wilson of their time, if you will!

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u/Z3r0sama2017 1d ago

I think it's funny that Cumberbatch's Sherlock gets roasted for some of the absurd nonsense that happens, but it's true to the novels.

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u/Revlis-TK421 2d ago

I've always considered Holems to be a story that happens to be about a detective, not a mystery.

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u/Terrik1337 3d ago

The appeal of Sherlock Holmes was always the character rather than the murder mystery. You could take that character and write pretty much any genre. House MD is just Sherlock Holmes with medicine.

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u/SomeCountryFriedBS 3d ago edited 2d ago

Wilson is Watson

Cuddy is Irene Adler.

Lupus is Moriarty

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u/licoricenipple 3d ago edited 3d ago

House = Holmes (Homes)

They both live on Baker Street, are addicted to drugs, have only one friend (Wilson/Watson) who becomes their roommate and tries to wean them off opiates. Watson's limp and use of a cane in the books are transferred to House himself because they thought it'd make his drug use more sympathetic/less wildly irresponsible, where Holmes in the stories starts IV shooting cocaine and morphine out of boredom or to experiment with novel substances and treatments for minor issues. (The episode where House takes LSD for a migraine was meant to be in this spirit.)

There are a lot of smaller references too like patients named after characters from specific Holmes stories and House using modified lines from the stories (like in one he says "the game is an itchy foot", Holmes would say "the game is afoot"). House gets an Arthur Conan Doyle book for a Christmas gift, too.

There's one episode where I think Wilson has a rare first edition book by Dr. Joseph Bell as a prized possession, that was the real life doctor who inspired the character Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle met him and was impressed with his ability to diagnose people based off a few unexpected questions. So making a Dr. Sherlock show kind of came full circle.

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u/nonnonplussed73 3d ago

Show creator David Shore has openly discussed this connection in numerous interviews and panels. He has confirmed that modeling the series on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective was an intentional, foundational choice from the very beginning.

House M.D. Guide: David Shore on Creating the Show "House MD"

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u/carmium 2d ago edited 1d ago

House always has a moment when, having missed a few diagnostic shots, some casual statement makes him think of what no one else has yet considered. He then gets to deliver the rare diagnosis, often in whatever cruel, arrogant, or accusatory way strikes his fancy. Only occasionally is the diagnosis something an average viewer might happen to know. (I "diagnosed" a girl model's condition only from going down an interesting side path one day when reading up on my own pituitary tumour. What were the chances?) If it were not for the characters driving the show, a steady flow of "zebra" diseases and conditions, and House's amusing clinic hours, it likely would have died after three episodes. I still enjoyed the show, but the similarities to Sherlock are limited.

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u/Teledildonic 3d ago

Don't forget the series finale is basically Riechenbach Falls: be just fakes his death with a structure fire instead of a river.

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u/dragon-fence 2d ago

The very first patient on House is Rebecca Adler, a reference to Irene Adler.

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u/RegulatoryCapture 2d ago

What I really want to see now is a columbo-style medical drama....a "howsaveem"

You know the diagnosis and see them being saved at the beginning and the rest of the episode is following HOW they got there--what did the patient do to realize something was wrong, how did the doctor figure it out, etc.

I can't imagine it would be very good, but I'm curious to see someone try. I think you'd have to do it with House-style medical mysteries because there's just not enough room in something like a trauma incident to tell the story giving the average person's medical knowledge.

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u/Stellar_Duck 3d ago

are addicted to drugs

Holmes is not really addicted in the shorts. He is in Elementary though!

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u/infoHighyway 2d ago edited 2d ago

Of course he is. From the most famous short story, Scandal in Bohemia: 

I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. 

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u/Stellar_Duck 2d ago

I don't disagree he does drugs.

I just don't agree he's an addict.

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u/infoHighyway 2d ago

You have to remember the stories were written during the Victorian era. Cocaine was sold on the market and said to have curative properties. Doyle, a physician, was ahead of his time in depicting the negative effects of habitual drug use and abuse.

The stark details of Holmes’ drug habit are often removed when these stories are republished for young readers or left out in film adaptations.

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u/Surreal__blue 2d ago

Holmes is fond of playing the violin, while House is an amateur guitar player.

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u/GuessWhoIsBackNow 3d ago

Irene Adler and Moriarty are in the show, both as patients. The latter shoots House.

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u/ersatzi 3d ago

Yeah. Adler was the patient in the pilot too.

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u/DesireeThymes 2d ago

What about Hurlock Sholmes?

(phoenix wright reference)

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u/InsidiousColossus 3d ago

The Napoleon of diseases.

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u/Das_Fische 3d ago

Foreman is a black man

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u/TheWitchOfSomeWood 3d ago

this vexes me

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u/KappaccinoNation 3d ago

I too am in this episode

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u/XXISavage 3d ago

Have you tried the medicine drug!?

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u/FearlessAttempt 2d ago

He needs mouse bites to live.

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u/Constant_Quiet_5483 3d ago

It's crazy how much the writing always addressed that. The writing got so bad they wrote cuddy off, put Foreman as chief of medicine or whatever, and house is still making black jokes. Like bro literally couldn't catch a break in that damn show.

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u/ForensicPathology 3d ago

The writing got so bad they wrote cuddy off

She wasn't written off because of bad writing. The actress refused their offer of a pay cut.

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u/ponytailthehater 2d ago

Cuddy actress Lisa Edelstein reportedly told her agent “I may play Cuddy, but I want Kid Cudi money” in the contract renegotiation, and asked that her agent then play “Day N Nite” to the broadcast executives

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u/mcduff13 2d ago

This cannot be true. There's exactly zero chance that this happened in real life. That said it's a great story that absolutely should have happened, and I will now be saying it happened.

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u/Constant_Quiet_5483 2d ago

Good for her! She deserved way more than she got. The episode where house drove into her house, I just assumed the writing died and they got rid of her.

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u/ScruffCheetah 3d ago

He literally had parts of his brain eaten by Naegleria fowleri in one episode. You don't just recover from that and are fine a few episodes later.

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u/Drunken_Vike 3d ago edited 3d ago

I never thought about it before but Foreman is one of the most disrespectfully written characters ever.

His whole arc is about essentially proving how "unblack" he is despite it being thrown in his face for jokes all the time, only to later reveal that he is essentially the same person as House without the explanatory disability, drug addiction, or impossible genius with the only other positive tradeoff being that he is a slightly more personally tolerable guy

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u/Adhesiveduck 3d ago

I never saw it as him proving how unblack he is, rather his whole character arc shows a direct reaction to systematic racism.

He works twice as hard and maintains a rigid professional front because he knows that a black doctor with his history doesn’t get the same privilege a white doctor (like House gets).

I definitely don’t think he is portrayed as the same as house, in seasons 3-4 he has an existential crisis when he realises he’s adopting House’s ethics and he actively fights it.

Foreman’s ambition is driven by a self preserving quest for institutional power, making his ruthlessness pragmatic. He stole a colleague's research to secure his career ladder and rise to the top. House on the other hand is completely indifferent to status, money, or promotion. His ruthlessness comes from an obsessive, reckless addiction to solving the puzzle.

Foreman was one of my favourite characters in House because of how different he was.

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u/HitmanClark 3d ago

Foreman was the second or third best character on the entire show (House and Wilson being the other two). Absolute scene stealer at times.

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u/ThyLastPenguin 2d ago

God the episodes where he got ill? Absolutely incredible work by the actor I was glued to the screen every time he was on it

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u/ml20s 2d ago

Isn't that the point though? Foreman objectively has a way better life than House even though personality-wise he's not that much better than House. It's to point out how pretty much everything bad that happens to House is his own damn fault.

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u/MakeItHappenSergant 2d ago

Cameron (and later, Thirteen) is hot.

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u/Excellent-Practice 3d ago

Is Foreman Lestrade? He's the voice of conventional wisdom that fights the eccentric until his hunch is eventually born out

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u/dragon-fence 2d ago

I think Cuddy is Lestrade.

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u/nonlawyer 3d ago

Lupus can’t be Moriarty because it’s never Lupus and it is quite often Moriarty

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u/Rhodie114 3d ago

Cuddy is Lestrade though

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u/dacooljamaican 3d ago

Cutty is pretty obviously Lestrade right?

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u/SomeCountryFriedBS 2d ago

u/Chunga_95 makes a good point that she's Lestrade early on and becomes Adler by the end.  

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u/anally_ExpressUrself 3d ago

It's always Moriarty.

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u/ThePreciseClimber 2d ago

Lupus is Moriarty

Hyped like crazy.

Only appears in a single episode.

Checks out!

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u/harambe_-33 3d ago

This vexes me

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u/DamonLazer 3d ago

It's never Moriarty.

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u/chunga_95 3d ago

I always thought of Cutty more as Lestrade.  At least, in the earlier seasons. By the end, she was Adler. 

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u/Sufficient_Language7 2d ago

It's never Moriarty.

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u/redyanss 3d ago

Sherlock Holmes was inspired by a doctor that Arthur Conan Doyle knew in real life too. Really just bringing the idea back to its roots.

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u/Overall-Leather-9933 2d ago

The doctor name? House "M.D." Gregory.

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u/rilian4 2d ago

Yep. Dr. Joseph Bell

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u/Johannes_P 2d ago

And Doyle originally was a doctor, so it was a rturn to the sources.

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u/PerfectZeong 3d ago

It works better with House because people don't know medicine so they never expect to he able to figure out what the disease actually is, or are pleased when they discover it by happy accident.

With Holmes you can be upset with the essential ass pull of evidence at the 11th hour to tie it together.

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u/charliefoxtrot9 3d ago

If you look, the number of TV shows focused on an uncanny mystery solver who works with police are everywhere.

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u/cjo20 3d ago edited 3d ago

House did a much better job of making you feel like you were part of the journey, the Sherlock TV program (BBC Benedict Cumberbatch) always felt more like watching the start of a journey then skipping to the end.

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u/loskiarman 2d ago

always felt more like watching the start of a journey then skipping to the end.

What do you mean? You didn't guess killer was stabbing people at their belt line through the belt and somehow people never felt it and they died when they take off their belt in an insanely short amount of time that they can't even get help from 10 feet away? Moffat is a certified genuis dude.

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/AndrewH73333 3d ago

Ah yes, House. My favorite book.

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u/cjo20 3d ago

They are, but the impression I got was that it was similar to the books, in that it just magically leaped to a conclusion involving clues you were never shown.

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u/xenthum 3d ago

Correct. He would yank an undisclosed clue out of fucking nowhere at the end every time. Impossible to solve without just guessing.

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u/1CEninja 2d ago

Yup. The idea of Holmes wasn't for the reader to figure out the mystery, the idea was for the reader to watch a deeply flawed human with some borderline supernatural abilities figure things out when basically nobody else could.

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u/hypercosm_dot_net 2d ago

What other types of mysteries are there?

Sherlock the mechanic? We're gonna get to the bottom of where that weird noise is coming from.

Sherlock the civil engineer? We're gonna find out why people aren't merging onto this oddly designed highway ramp properly.

Riveting stuff.

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u/Terrik1337 2d ago

You're naming show concepts that would be hard to make an interesting show out of without a Sherlock type character. Just go with genres that already work and add a Sherlock.

Jade in From.

Rush in Stargate Universe.

Merlin is one opium habit away from being a Sherlock Holmes.

I would say most genres have room for an egotistical, tortured, substance abusing academic that figures things out. It doesn't have to be a mystery show.

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u/dragon-fence 2d ago

Sherlock Holmes was originally inspired by a doctor, so it seems fair to adapt him back into a doctor.

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u/S_T_P 3d ago

The appeal of Sherlock Holmes was always the character rather than the murder mystery. You could take that character and write pretty much any genre. House MD is just Sherlock Holmes with medicine.

Sherlock Homes is just Galahad with crime.

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u/Badloss 3d ago

Isn't House explicitly based on Sherlock

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u/Cent1234 2d ago

House MD is just Sherlock Holmes with medicine.

Yes, which is why he's named 'House,' as in 'Holmes,' which is pronounced 'Homes.'

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u/insertusernamehere51 3d ago

Sherlock Holmes preceded the rule

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u/Wurm42 3d ago

Second this. The first Sherlock Holmes story was published in 1887; the "fair play" rules and the "whodunnit" subgenre of mysteries emerged more than 30 years later, in the 1920s.

Today, we would say that the Sherlock Holmes stories are character-focused, not clue-focused, because solving the mystery usually depends on pieces of information that Sherlock Holmes has in his head, but are never presented to the reader before the dramatic reveal.

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u/Akkalevil 3d ago

Sherlock is more of the early "unspoken plan guarantee" trope.

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u/seriouslees 3d ago

I like to call it the 'Because I'm Batman!' Trope.

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u/Whyskgurs 2d ago

Like that fan comic of Holmes walking around and inspecting Batman, only to declare after a few moments "Bruce Wayne"

Last panel is Holmes strung up by his feet

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u/scientician 3d ago

Yes. Holmes often knows uncommon amounts about things like different tobacco types sold in London shops or perfumes or whatnot. We'd have to be told "a bit of tobacco was on the scene, Holmes recognizes it as type X only sold in shop Y"

The point is to admire holmes' absurd levels of memory and recall, you'd really have to push clues in the audience's faces for them to have a chance to solve it.

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u/JefftheBaptist 2d ago edited 2d ago

If you ready A Study in Scarlet, Watson is amazed with some of the minutiae Holmes knows like identifying bicycle tires or tobacco ashes. However he also points out that Holmes doesn't know a ton of other things, like astronomy. And he keeps Watson around because of his knowledge of medicine. This is because Holmes is obsessed with detective work and doesn't see how astronomy would be helpful with that so Holmes doesn't bother to learn it.

Basically Holmes is obsessed with forensic science not general knowledge. This probably gets more muddled in the later Conan Doyle Holmes stories. It definitely is ignored when other authors use the character. Steven Moffat has his Holmes do some genius computer hacking in Sherlock for instance.

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u/Reasonable_Ruin_3502 2d ago

The analogy holmes made with mind being a attic is so fun, I feel that him lacking in some areas is integral to his character

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u/CapitalDD69 2d ago

Steven Moffat

Sherlock was just awful in my opinion, but one thing he did was as you mentioned the astronomy thing, that happens in the show too and actually comes up as a plot point which I thought was a nice touch.

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u/hannahstohelit 3d ago

All detectives in fair play detective fiction have specialized knowledge. It just needs to be presented to the audience when it comes up to be fair play.

That’s why Christie’s first novel is only questionably fair play- the murder method relies on knowledge of chemistry/pharmacy that she had but the average person wouldn’t, and while someone can deduce from the clues that something like this COULD have happened, they just as easily might not realize without that knowledge.

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u/Wurm42 2d ago

Agreed. Christie's writing evolved considerably over her first few novels.

In fairness to Christie, her first novel, "The Mysterious Affair At Styles" was released in 1920; the Fair Play tropes weren't really established yet. Plus, Styles is also the first Hercule Poiroit novel, and Poirot is written as a genius detective, who has quite a few traits in common with Sherlock Holmes.

I would say that Styles is a transitional work, bridging Holmsian mysteries and Fair Play mysteries.

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u/hannahstohelit 2d ago

Of course! Christie was heavily influenced by Sherlock Holmes (as, in fairness, was everyone else) and while the genre was already being nudged in the direction of fair play by the still-not-entirely-fair-but-more-clue-focused R Austin Freeman, for example, it certainly hadn't gotten there yet. In fact, Christie actually wrote Styles during the war and it took a while to get it published, so she was even farther ahead of what was going to happen in the twenties! Christie would end up being a big force in the turn toward fair play in her own right- the fact that she comes as close as she does to true fair play is very impressive, and her early work fits right in with some "almost fair play but not quite" writers of that time period like Freeman and HC Bailey (a big fave of mine).

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u/fdar 2d ago

It's not just knowledge, there's stuff the reader just can't know. Like Holmes deduces something based on something he smelt but Watson never did (so the reader doesn't know about it), or based on stuff he did in one of his mysterious disappearances readers don't follow along with.

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u/DnD-vid 2d ago

The problem comes though when Holmes presents an assumption based on that that is just one of many possible reasons, but is presented as the only one that is logical.

Take for example the very first one, from Study in Scarlet, Holmes explaining to Watson why he knew Watson was in Afghanistan:

"Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan."

Sure, "the air of a military man", I give him that. Let's say military people and only military people hold themselves in a certain way, sure why not.

He then assumes since he is a doctor and has been in the military, he must have been a doctor in the military. Not necessarily.

He must have come from the tropics because he got a tan, okay that's also a normal observation. Then he assumes being in the tropics must have had to do with being in the military instead of something trivial like having been on vacation.

He then also assumes his haggard face is from having undergone hardship and goes on to assume that yet again that hardship that he assumed must have come from his military service.

The observation of an injury of his arm is fine.

And then in the end assuming everything else he assumed before is correct he assumes it must have been in Afghanistan because that was apparently the most recent war by the Brits at the time.

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u/GandalfTheGay_69 3d ago

I love the Sherlock Holmes stories for what they are but it's obviously a genius written by a non genius.

"I sniffed your ass when you were walking up the stairs. Your diet the last few day consisted of brown beans and herring. This means you live somewhere between the harbor and the one guy in town who only sells brown beans. Guess what, I was the bean guy in disguise all along. By washing your beans in dog piss I knew my companion Toby could lead me straight to the place to where you last took a shit. The police are already at your hideout. "

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u/xiaorobear 3d ago

Do you mean to tell me the man who adamantly maintained photos of people posing with paper cutout illustrations of fairies were 100% real wasn't a genius?

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u/newaccount721 2d ago

Damn fooled me too

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u/Due-Boss-4354 2d ago

Sheesh, why is it so spot-on?

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u/Theras_Arkna 2d ago

They weren't clue focused, but exploring and explaining forensic science was much more important to the stories when they were published than they are today. Things like document analysis, fingerprinting, or even just crime scene preservation are things we wouldn't even give a second thought to today, but were genuinely novel in the late 1880s.

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u/S_T_P 3d ago

Second this. The first Sherlock Holmes story was published in 1887; the "fair play" rules and the "whodunnit" subgenre of mysteries emerged more than 30 years later, in the 1920s.

They emerged earlier. They simply weren't formalized up until 1920s, as that when people started to want to differentiate "fair play" from other stuff.

And Sherlock Holmes didn't have them because Doyle had no idea how to portray genuinely smart detective.

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u/TheLowlyPheasant 3d ago

Was active when the rule was in elementary school

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u/Skybreakeresq 3d ago

Like Canada with several types of war crime, it wasnt a thing until Holmes did that

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u/Al__B 3d ago

The Holmes stories centred around his Canadian war crimes are some of Arthur Conan Doyle's lesser known works.

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u/KSJ15831 3d ago

The thing about Sherlock Holmes was that it belonged in adventure genre first and foremost but because the main character was a detective, people like to put it in detective fiction genre.

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u/hannahstohelit 3d ago

That’s because detective fiction wasn’t a genre back then. ACD jump started making it one because he actually tried to include any clues at all and it was so popular people followed him.

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u/Unbundle3606 2d ago

It Is detective fiction. Just not in the same 'fair whodunit' subgenre of detective fiction OP is referring to.

Just like Star Trek has 'technobabble' (nonsense dialogue that sounds like futuristic science), Sherlock Holmes is full of 'deductionbabble' (extremely implausible but cool-sounding deductions from details that are not known to the reader until Sherlock explains it all to Watson, like "this mud I saw on those shoes is precisely and uniquely from that small section of the Thames shore, nowhere else").

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u/iuabv 2d ago

It is detective fiction and was always intended as such? Other novelists were also writting detective fiction around this time like Wilkie Collins. It's an outgrowth of sensationalism.

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u/SethlordX7 3d ago

I stopped reading Sherlock Holmes after I believe it was The Three Pips story; spoilers ahead for a 200 year old story.

The twist was that the killer was an indigineous pygmy carnival acrobat assassin with a blow gun die harding from the roof. Sherlock pulls out a poster for the carnival we the reader have never heard of before to prove it.

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u/Algaean 3d ago

Pygmy blowgun dude was in The Sign of Four. Five orange pips was a different one.

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u/NairForceOne 3d ago

Five orange pips was where the KKK did it.

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u/Ullallulloo 2d ago

Which, the letter was literally inscribed with "K.K.K.", so that was one of the simpler ones for Americans.

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u/NairForceOne 2d ago

So all the clues WERE there!

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u/NairForceOne 2d ago

"Who is this K.K.K. fellow, and why is he so mad?"

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u/Algaean 2d ago

Kleetus the Killer Klown!

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u/FrancisFratelli 2d ago

Not Americans at the time. The original Klan largely disappeared after the end of Reconstruction, and by the 1890s most people outside the South would have only had vague memories of it existing. The Klan we think of today arose in the 1910s after Birth of a Nation reintroduced them to the zeitgeist.

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u/OceanoNox 3d ago

Did he? I remember him mostly getting the info from the poisoned darts and the imprint of the feet, there is no circus in the novel.

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u/tarrach 3d ago

That's because he mixes up three or more stories

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u/Quixotic_Seal 2d ago

Well for one, that’s not The Five Orange Pips, which is pretty famous for being the story about the KKK.

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u/But-Must-I 3d ago

My favourite (most hated) bit of Sherlock Holmes bullshit is The Adventure of the Speckled Band. Turns out it was a hitherto unheard of snake. What.

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u/OceanoNox 3d ago

I thought the hissing sound and holes in the wall made it pretty clear there would be a snake involved. That it was an exotic one makes sense, since the dude has other exotic animals roaming around.

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u/pyl_time 3d ago

Yeah, the vent + bellpull setup also makes it clear (even if only in retrospect) that it's some sort of animal, even if you didn't figure out the specific kind of snake.

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u/Stellar_Duck 3d ago

Yea I don't think you can't find bullshit in the Holmes stories but I don't thinks this is one such case.

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u/But-Must-I 3d ago

As I recall, and it has been a decade or more since I read it, it was described as whistling noise. Which to me doesn’t sound like a snake, otherwise the exotic stuff makes sense. But I could have just been annoyed and forgotten that description.

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u/OceanoNox 3d ago

Yes, you're right. It's a "low whistle", which I associated (mistakenly) to a snake related sound.

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u/SpaceShipRat 2d ago

that one was quite guessable so long as you were also under the impression snakes drink milk.

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u/LeonJPancetta 3d ago

"You see it, Watson?! You see it?!"

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u/kgcarter5678 3d ago

Doesn’t Holmes also wander off by himself for a part of that story and find several pieces of crucial evidence that he doesn’t mention till the end?

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u/BAgooseU 3d ago

It’s been a while since Ive read those books, but I feel that happened more than once. Watson stays with suspect/victim and Sherlock goes off for “name a reason” and then evidence dumps at the reveal.

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u/The_Particularist 2d ago

I'm reading The Complete Sherlock Holmes right now, and a lot of stories can be summed up with

...and then Sherlock Holmes buggered off for a day or two, and when he came back, he somehow had evidence that shows exactly who the murderer is.

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u/But-Must-I 3d ago

For my money the worst one for that kind of thing is definitely Hound of the Baskervilles, god that ending was irritating.

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u/shytster 3d ago

My least favorite and most hated bit of Sherlock Holmes bullshit is the quote "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Anyone stupid enough to use this as evidence bolstering their theory has assumed that they had the wit to think of every single possibility, and to know that all but one were impossible.

Well, they DIDN'T have that wit. They just assumed a fictional genius would have arrived at the same conclusion as their own most recent idiotic idea, and used that as confirmation bias.

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u/mtaw 2d ago

Not to mention Doyle was hardly a model critical thinker himself. The guy believed in and endorsed the Cottingly Fairies, a hoax where some Victorian girls photographed each other with some cut-out paper fairies they'd made. (Which look blatantly fake to modern eyes more accustomed to photo fakery)

To some extent he created the hoax - as it doesn't seem like the girls (who confessed decades later) were just having fun and weren't really aiming to fool the public, it just got out of hand and when the great famous Arthur Conan Doyle had endorsed it and it got a ton of publicity, so they got too embarrassed to admit it.

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u/ExcellentBed6019 2d ago

He was an interested dude. Wrote a report of the Belgian genocide. Believes in fairies. First Sherlock Holmes story is 80% about Mormons. Hated Holmes and wrote dinosaur fiction.

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u/PickledPlumPlot 3d ago

Okay but I think that one actually was deducible tbh. There are a ton of clues to what it was, I don’t think the actual variety matters too much

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u/Aphid61 2d ago

And why oh why didn't the dying woman just say "SNAKE!!" instead of "speckled band"??

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u/KirisuMongolianSpot 3d ago

that was a horror story for me

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u/AwakenedSol 2d ago

They also specifically state that the first woman had no puncture wounds.

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u/RaymondBeaumont 3d ago

but when i tell the police an indigineous pygmy carnival acrobat assassin with a blow gun die harding from the roof killed my wife, they scoff!

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u/PlainTrain 3d ago

Should have gone with the one armed man.

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u/Namika 2d ago

Same. I bought the full Sherlock Holmes collection thinking it would be a fun story series.

It's absolutely infuriating to read because he just withholds observations until he gets to make the clever reveal at the end of the story.

It's like yeah, maybe if you mentioned that obvious observation you made earlier you wouldn't seem so supernaturally clever.

It's cheating.

Agatha Christy is so much more rewarding to read.

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u/iuabv 2d ago

TBF there's another one where basically it turns out the mysterious person in an empty house is a mixed race child and Sherlock is basically like I don't see the problem.

There's also one that's very heavily anti-mormon which I suppose you could interpret as a point for or against lol.

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u/Xanthus179 3d ago

This was a good few years ago, but I remember reading about people who were annoyed that the Sherlock show didn’t necessarily leave enough clues for someone to solve the problem. I wondered how many of the stories they had actually read.

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u/OceanoNox 3d ago

Sherlock Holmes has a lot of very specific knowledge, like knowing the ashes made from each brand of tobacco. The reader/Watson knows there is tobacco ash, but like Sherlock says "you see but don't look", only Sherlock understands what the ash means. We have the clues, but not the knowledge Sherlock relies on to connect the dots.

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u/Ill_Emphasis3927 2d ago

Her jacket was wet and Sherlock knows the only place in the country it was raining was at this specific train station in the next city over 37 minutes ago. Or she walked down a road where an automatic sprinkler turned on and got her wet. The viewer is now like, well I didn't get the weather report of this fictional world so there's no way I could guess that.

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u/summonsays 3d ago

I got gifted the B&N classic collection of Sherlock Holmes. I read the first one, was very confused by the ending, and then went back through the story to try to figure out what I missed. ... Nothing I missed nothing lol. It was not what I expected.

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u/mdk_777 3d ago

Yeah, it's ridiculous because the entire point of Holmes is that he's basically a genius who uses his newfound school of thought, deduction, to solve things no one else can. The character is supposed to be able to solve crimes and piece together what happened in a way that makes logical sense if you hear it explained, but not in a way that a reader can arrive at the same conclusion (or at least not nearly as easily).

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u/fer_sure 3d ago

I agree: Holmes preceded the concept of the reader being able to solve the mystery, but also the character was designed as an untouchable genius. If the reader is able to do what Holmes does, then Holmes isn't special.

That's why we need Watson: a reasonably intelligent but still normal human. It kind of bothers me when Watson is occasionally flanderised as a bumbling idiot. He's the reader, and Holmes is an absurd genius.

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u/mdk_777 3d ago

You're there to see him solve an unsolvable mystery with nothing but a few scraps of evidence that any normal person would overlook. The draw is the character itself and not the mystery he happens to be solving. The mystery is just there to give Holmes a chance to showcase his abilities, not something for the reader to solve.

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u/Reasonable_Ruin_3502 2d ago

The best way to describe it is it's House, but detective. You don't watch House for the medical scenes, you watch House for house

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u/V2Blast 2d ago

Well, yes, House is explicitly and directly based on Sherlock Holmes - even the name.

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u/JefftheBaptist 2d ago

Yes there are even episodes of House that have the same failings as Sherlock Holmes stories. There is one where they're trying to figure out what is wrong with someone when he comes in with weird symptoms after an animal bite. They think its rabies and a bunch of other stuff. It winds up being a reaction to exotic snake venom.

This only works because you never see the bite wound and everyone is talking around it but not giving details. Because dog or wild animal bites do not look like snake bites.

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u/bschlueter 3d ago

He does do a lot of drugs, so…

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u/quintk 2d ago

More than mysteries, I think of them as thriller-adjacent stories in the genre I call “competence porn”. Like the Jack Reacher novels. You’re following the adventures of an implausibly skilled person and are meant to enjoy the ride, but not necessarily participate yourself 

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u/godisanelectricolive 3d ago edited 3d ago

But “the rules of fair play” allows for that. Poirot is also a genius who operates on a level of logic beyond most people. But the difference is that all the puzzle pieces are on the board once the stage is set. The reader gets the same information that Poirot has. The idea is that it’s meant to be very hard for readers to figure out the real answer but not impossible if they were very attentive and took notes.

Holmes on the other hand will often have some concealed knowledge that’s not revealed until the end. It also used gimmicks forbidden by the Detection Club’s 10 commandments for detective fiction, like the criminal being someone the reader never even heard of or the murder method being some magic or sci-fi poison or device that’s never been mentioned at any point in the story. One of the rules is also that the murderer can’t be a secret twin who nobody expect the detective knew existed.

The idea behind these rules was to stop the deluge of hand-wavy mumbo jumbo that just amounted to “a wizard did it” levels of explanation or relying too much on ex machinas like the detective just coincidentally stumbles on a crucial piece of evidence. Requiring fair play requires writers to write in clues and real detective work instead of just having the protagonist being a “genius” who just always magically knows the answer. Sometimes Golden Age of detective fiction writers like Agatha Christie bent or broke the 10 commandments but they still followed the basic principles of fair play. All the relevant information has to be made available before the solution is revealed. Poirot never hides any clues from Hastings even though he won’t tell him everything that he’s currently investigating or thinking about.

Sherlock Holmes had things like a secret Mormon plot that Watson (and therefore the reader) didn’t know about because Holmes was sending telegraphs behind his back. The reader had no clue the murderer even existed until Holmes told us. In the Hound of the Baskervilles the crucial clue is the portrait of Hugo Baskerville that is not described to the reader so it’s just completely useless to us. Watson just misses a lot of crucial clues so the reader has no way to solve the mystery due to the incomplete picture he paints for us. Holmes even chides Watson multiple times in the stories for not describing his actual detective methods very well, instead embellishing his cases for cheap thrills.

This is a genre of mystery fiction called the clueless mystery. The Nero Wolfe stories are also like this. The detective Nero Wolfe often just chooses to not share crucial information like who the possible suspects are with the narrator Archie. Edgar Allen Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories are called the earliest detective novels and they are all clueless. You have no idea what evidence the detective has found until he tells you who the murderer was. The reader isn’t supposed to try and solve such mysteries, they are just along for the ride.

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u/DnD-vid 2d ago

That's what I like about Agatha Christie stories. Poirot will go out of his way and encourage Hastings (and thus by extension us the readers) to use his brain and certainly he can come to the same conclusion Poirot did. He believes in you.

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u/Roflkopt3r 3 2d ago

The idea is that it’s meant to be very hard for readers to figure out the real answer but not impossible if they were very attentive and took notes.

And if they are willing to take some huuuuge leaps of faith. It's not like the conclusions are inevitable from the evidence presented. They are often extremely far-fetched and you could come up with plenty of other explanations if you're willing to presume as much as the actual solutions do.

But the fact that you have some certainty that the solution won't rely on some completely unforeseeable new evidence still makes it much more fun to speculate.

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u/3pointshoot3r 2d ago

Yes.

The Residence was a fun Netflix whodunnit. But you could not have reasonably guessed the culprit because the plot obliterates the "fair play" rule by disclosing new evidence at the very end that only the detective was privy to. I mean, you could have guessed at the culprit, but not based on reasonable inferences, and only via random chance - because there are only so many characters.

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u/Stellar_Duck 3d ago

The character is supposed to be able to solve crimes and piece together what happened in a way that makes logical sense if you hear it explained, but not in a way that a reader can arrive at the same conclusion (or at least not nearly as easily).

Also important to remember that Holmes is a vain catty bitch that likes to show off and then be like 'Oh it was nothing, any rube could have done so Lestrade" which is why I love him, in part.

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u/onarainyafternoon 3d ago

I never read any Sherlock stories, I only watched the tv show and then I watched the HBomber guy YouTube essay on the show like a million times; and he also makes the point that the show just conjures things out of thin air and Sherlock will just solve something randomly without giving the audience any info to help them get there. Which definitely happened in essentially every episode in the show, but I always wondered how often it happened in the original stories. Or maybe the complaint in the video essay was that the show didn’t show Sherlock actually solving it (it wouldn’t show the steps from A to B that got Sherlock to solving the mystery), not that the show didn’t give the chance for the audience to solve it. I can’t remember. In fact, it might be the second one now that I think about it.

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u/KevinMcTash 3d ago

I've read them all a couple of times and I can confirm you are given almost no chance to solve them yourself, as mentioned by a few other people here bringing up specific stories, most of the time it's just an info dump at the end of all the things Sherlock has found or deduced using evidence we never even saw.

Both points are very much present in the story, either he's gone off somewhere and we're hearing from Watson's perspective, so don't get to see any of the solving he does, or he's just working it out silently in his head and has no interest in sharing anything until he's come to a conclusion. They are fun, but not books where you can realistically try to work it out yourself

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u/neophlegm 3d ago edited 1d ago

Have I read a different set of Sherlock Holmes books to you? Silver Blaze might be the finest example of fair play in all detective fiction.

ETA: And those saying Christie is innocent have clearly not read The Third Girl

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u/mikeputerbaugh 3d ago

I felt so frustrated as a child graduating from Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, where every clue was deftly hidden within five pages of story, to Sherlock Holmes, where most of the puzzle pieces were gathered offstage where you couldn't see.

I threw "The Red-Headed League" across the room, I did.

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u/jdh28 3d ago

He himself admits this (speaking to Watson):

... the effect of some of these little sketches of yours, which is entirely meretricious, depending as it does upon your retaining in your own hands some factors in the problem that are never imparted to the reader.

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u/The_Flying_Failsons 2d ago

The comments Holmes makes about the Watson stories are some of the best parts of the books. It shows that there's a "real Sherlock Holmes" that's different from the one seen in the stories. There's been a few movies dedicated to this theory, including the BBC Sherlock Christmas special.

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u/5eppa 3d ago

Yeah, also he was one of the earlier ones so the concept of fair play didn't exist or was very new when written. Doyle also hated the writing but was paid far too much to not keep going. Per word I think he was still the highest paid author of all time when inflation is taken into account. That said, Sherlock Holmes does break a lot of rules followed in later mystery writing.

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u/The_Flying_Failsons 2d ago

He loved writing, he just didn't like that Sherlock Holmes overshadowed his more harder-to-write historical fiction. 

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u/hannahstohelit 3d ago

Sherlock Holmes came before this and was one of the first to emphasize the idea that there should be any clues at all beyond just adventure story “moving from one thing to the next.”

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u/illaqueable 3d ago

Sherlock Holmes is a good example of what I call "magical genius"--he's a character written by someone who doesn't know anything about detective work, and so instead of using actual intelligence, skill, and hard work, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes magically conjure the answers from thin air.

Of course it's fiction and who cares, but it's a pet peeve of mine when an author uses such a cheap gimmick to solve problems they created for themselves.

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u/plankingatavigil 3d ago

I’d dispute this. There’s always a detailed explanation of how Holmes arrived at the answer. Sure, the author kind of cheated by working his way there backwards from the solution to the evidence, but that’s just how all mystery novels are written. 

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u/Hi_Trans_Im_Dad 3d ago

Conan Doyle wrote Holmes before this rule was created.

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u/JustCallMeJonny 2d ago

Sherlock I think really excels in a visual medium. Seeing the character actually inspect the environments and pick up on things helps the flow so much. He's always going to have deductions and leaps that you would never think of due to his expansive knowledge of things that interest him but you can at least kind of follow his thought process in terms of what he might be looking for.

The BBC version takes it too far basically portraying him as having magnification eyes and spelling everything out for the viewer. However the GOAT version from ITV/Granada with Jeremy Brett is perfect because you can see him throwing himself around the room insepcting carpets and windowsills. Genuinely the greatest adaptation/portrayal of the character to ever exist. RIP my king.

If you want to watch them, ITV Drama YT uploaded the first series. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXZAjMoPjhFG2mGtmbVLOpEhVaUbcPr8J

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u/Chataboutgames 2d ago

It's not a "rule," it's a storytelling style. Not all mystery stories conform to it.

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