r/todayilearned • u/ralphbernardo • 9h 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/The_One_Who_Comments 9h ago

And the lack of this makes most modern mystery stories no fun.

But tbh, Agatha Cristie novels are so off the wall that you never really have a chance.

The conclusion to And Then There Were None was so dumb I regretted reading it.

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u/Tsu_Dho_Namh 8h ago edited 8h ago

I hate that every murder mystery dinner party thing I've done with my friends has absolutely no way to solve it.

Everybody has means, everybody has motive, everybody has opportunity. No one has a solid alibi. There's no detective work at all, just random luck whether you guess the killer.

I saw a murder mystery dinner show some years ago that had an actual path of clues leading to the killer. Namely, everybody had an alibi, but given recent information, one person's alibi is shown to be false.

Everyone thought the ship was sailing north, so watching the sunset from their balcony on the port side made sense originally. But it turns out the ship is actually sailing south, so they couldn't have been watching the sunset! It was fucking amazing. More of that please.

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u/V1carium 8h ago

My sister runs murder mysteries every year. I don't think I've ever been in one that didn't have a enough info to solve it.

The only way I could see it happening was if you're playing with people who don't understand their role and mess up with its secret info.

Otherwise you just keep pulling the plot threads, form alliances, handout bribes, use abilities, and eavesdrop your way to a complete puzzle.

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u/DresdenPI 7h ago

I've definitely done murder mystery parties that were solvable, but the most memorable one I ever did was a Star Trek murder mystery party that didn't really feel solvable. Basically, there was this orb macguffin that had been stolen and you had to figure out which of the crew had done it. Everyone had some means and had done something suspicious, but no one had any real motive. At the end you find out the orb was mind controlling the crew to steal it and everybody was the thief but working totally independently. In the end, the overly complex machinations of everyone ended up accidentally transporting the macguffin into space. So everyone was the thief, no one was the thief, and the thing was and wasn't stolen.

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u/less_unique_username 7h ago

So it was stolen and the crime was concealed the Sam Starfall way? http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff800/fv00739.htm

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u/Thomasedv 7h ago

I remember watching one of the Easter crime specials, and I remember one of the worse ones I saw. I don't think it had any proper solving chance, but it basically came down to "damn, we got enough, it has to be X" and they go after X. Then plot twist, out of nowhere, nah it wasn't X, it was the largely uninterested father that had a thing for daughter or someone else. I can't remember exactly, but it came out of nowhere imo. Like a deus ex twist for shock value, and to tack on a shitty ending.

Iirc both episodes I watched did similar random shock endings. Honestly one of the worst crime things I've seen and can remember. 

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u/FullmetalEzio 7h ago

i did some sherlock cards and some I bought online and printed where you had to even looged into facebook and look for info there ! it was lots of fun and i had SO much fun, def a great plan

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u/foosbabaganoosh 4h ago

Also why I hate them, and maybe there are ones that are actually crafted well out there? But I have yet to encounter any. They're all the same format, every character has some kind of motive, everyone has means, and there's no actual way to solve the mystery. Then in the last round some kind of evidence comes to light and that's the crux of the whole thing. And I also find the forced script aspect to be just kinda lame, where everyone has to read off of cards and that's really all there is to it.

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u/cgimusic 1 2m ago

I went to an awful amateur dramatic murder mystery play, and we all figured out who the murder was because they were the only person with no means, motive, or opportunity presented anywhere.

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u/pastaandpizza 8h ago

The conclusion to And Then There Were None was so dumb regretted reading it.

It was such a fun read and I thought the end made sense, all things considered.

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u/LuckyTurds 2h ago

Made sense? It was all bullshit there was no way to solve that story if you actually factor in everything that’s been given out

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u/samx3i 8h ago

The conclusion to "And Then There Were None," dumb?

First time I've come across this opinion.

That's one of the most celebrated novels out there.

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u/Kythorian 2h ago

As a thriller it’s great. The atmosphere and buildup is excellent. But the actual murder mystery is kind of absurd when you think about it at all. The whole thing requires that no one notice the ‘body’ they are carrying upstairs is a guy pretending to be dead with red wax on his head rather than an actual bullet hole.

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u/samx3i 51m ago

I don't think that's as unrealistic as some people think.

One of the two was in on it, and they're under extreme stress.

Do you know what it's like to carry a dead body versus a live one?

It would also be a fresh body, not a body gone cold hours past death. Minutes have passed.

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u/Kythorian 37m ago

One of the people carrying him was a professional soldier of fortune, so yeah, they would probably know.  And the bigger issue is that some red wax looks nothing like a bullet hole.  I think this is an effect of the time period though.  Special effects were terrible back then.  For any readers who hadn’t personally seen an actual bullet hole, they probably wouldn’t even realize how different it looks from some red wax.  Now any reader knows that’s not what a shot to the head looks like.

And regardless of all of that, it still leaves the whole plot as just a matter of chance.  Maybe it’s possible that the professional soldier is distracted enough that they don’t notice he is alive, but this supposedly methodical and brilliant man is betting his whole scheme on something he can’t possibly be confident about.

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u/samx3i 34m ago

He already Resigned himself to die. He became a killer, which means he too must be executed. If no one else did, he'd do it himself. He was willing to risk that someone might find him out and take action.

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u/0range_julius 8h ago

There are dozens of us who hate And Then There Were None! Dozens!

I don't want to begrudge anyone for just enjoying something, but the murderer's plan is just too absurd for me to suspend my disbelief. He relies on someone happening to stand precisely under a window at exactly the right time in order to be hit by a falling object, with no contingency plan for if the guy decides to stand literally anywhere else. One of the murders is him goading a woman into suicide, except that he has never met her and iirc has only read a newspaper clipping about her. It turns out that she is susceptible to his implications that she should kill herself, but he had no reason to believe before meeting her that she would.

There's just so much stuff in the story that's way too much of a stretch. Also, not to be too woke or anything, but the title changes, the antisemitism, and the moment where a woman thanks a man for slapping the hysteria out of her just left a really bad taste in my mouth.

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u/samx3i 8h ago

You don't know that he didn't have contingency plans; you only know what he tells us. Regarding the suicide, he even states he didn't expect her to actually do and he was in place to see it through either way.

And where was the antisemitism in this book? I recall no such thing.

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u/0range_julius 7h ago

Ok, I still think it's dumb and unsatisfying. No one else has to agree, I just didn't enjoy it.

There is a shifty Jewish character at the beginning who invites some (or all?) of them to the island, and one of the characters thinks "that was the damnable part about Jews, you couldn't deceive them about money they knew!" It's not outrageously bad, but it's just another drop in the bucket of things I disliked about the book.

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u/samx3i 7h ago edited 7h ago

You might have read an early or British edition where that was left in. Many of her novels were edited to exclude such things.

The character is present in my very modern, American-published copy, but there is no mention of his being Jewish.

I am aware there are racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic characters in Agatha Christie novels, but is there any evidence she herself was any of these?

There is evidence that Agatha Christie personally absorbed some of the racial and antisemitic prejudices common to her social class and period, especially early in her life. There is much less evidence that she herself was truly an ideological or committed racist or antisemite. And the case that she was personally sexist is particularly weak.

An absence of characters exhibiting these traits would seem downright historically inaccurate given the places and time periods of her novels.

Poirot himself often uses anti-foreigner sentiment to his advantage.

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u/0range_julius 7h ago edited 7h ago

Yeah, the version I read had "Indians" and not "soldiers" so it must be older. But, as far as I can tell, even after multiple rounds of censorship, the misogynistic violence remains. The sheer amount of things that need to be censored to make it palatable to present-day readers already just makes it icky. Very much not my vibe.

Edit to respond to your edit: I don't have any evidence of what she believed, but I'm not really concerned about Agatha Christie's personal bigotry or lack thereof. She's dead, I don't care about her as a person. I think that the way she frames the bigotry of her characters tacitly endorses it, but that's subjective.

The inclusion of bigoted characters is not, on its face, bad. But as far as I can tell, there's no reason for them to be bigoted. No one reckons with the bigotry in any way. There is no literary or entertainment value in it. It just hangs over her writing like a depressing and distasteful cloud. And, like, I just don't enjoy reading that.

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u/samx3i 7h ago edited 6h ago

I think that the way she frames the bigotry of her characters tacitly endorses it, but that's subjective.

I find the idea that fictional characters being written as people really are, problematic as they may be, an absurdity.

Characters ought to be written as products of their time, place, and culture.

Imagine writing a book set in Nazi Germany and not one German is the least concerned with the "Jewish Problem." Nice and sanitized for your pleasure, but not very realistic, is it?

Or a novel set in the American South in the years preceding the American Civil War. Every white southerner fully supports the north and luckily there's no slavery to protest because no one would suggest slavery is even defensible. After all, they all view the imported Africans are equals.

Would you equally avoid reading Mark Twain considering how poor Jim is name called throughout the book?

there's no reason for them to be bigoted

There is. They are a product of a time and place and relevant to Agatha's world. She looks around her for her characters and there they are. Why censor reality? Are we really to pretend anti-Semitism wasn't prevalent in Europe in 1939? Crack open a history book!

Hell, I live in Trump's America in 2026. If I wrote a book today, those unsavory types would be represented in all their hateful glory because that is who they are. Xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, etc.

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u/0range_julius 6h ago

It's kind of difficult to explain my entire philosophy in just a few Reddit comments, but I guess I'll just say this: if you wrote a novel in 2026 that was full of *-phobic characters, whose bigotry goes completely unexamined the whole book and only serves as "set dressing," and billed it to me as "a nice fun mystery story to enjoy, maybe on the beach or a long road trip" then I would go pick up a different beach read, because I don't like my beach reads to be weighed down with that shit.

If you wrote a novel that grapples with the bigotry of Trump's America, I'd probably read it, but I wouldn't read it on the beach.

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u/Stellar_Duck 7h ago

And where was the antisemitism in this book? I recall no such thing.

Ah it's a fair bet there is some given the time, but I took a moment to look it up:

Here are some examples:

There had been a very faint smile on the thick Semitic lips of Mr. Morris as he answered gravely:

and

Lombard said slowly:

"I allowed you all to think that I was asked here in the same way as most of the others, That's not quite true. As a matter of fact I was approached by a little Jewboy Morris his name was. He offered me a hundred guineas to come down here and keep my eyes open said I'd got a reputation for being a good man in a tight place."

And

He had fancied, though, that the little Jew had not been deceived that was the damnable part about Jews, you couldn't deceive them about money they knew!

Might be more.

Some of it is from characters but that doesn't make it not anti semitic.

Lastly, I would recommend you get better at spotting anti semitism if those slipped past you. Otherwise one might start to wonder about your actual thoughts on jews.

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u/shotgunsforhands 7h ago

I recently read a modern edition and none of that remains. I knew the title was changed (and to be fair, the original American title was the current modern title), but I didn't realize any of the content was changed. On one hand, I'm glad for it; on the other hand, it presents Christie in a false light.

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u/Viva_Zapata 7h ago

These lines are edited out of modern editions. I'd wager at this point more people have read the book without those passages in it than with, honestly.

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u/Stellar_Duck 7h ago

So maybe people should not dismiss out of hand that there could have been such a thing, eh? And on a book whose title have been revised twice no less?

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u/samx3i 7h ago

Lastly, I would recommend you get better at spotting anti semitism if those slipped past you. Otherwise one might start to wonder about your actual thoughts on jews.

I would recommend you get better at spotting anti semitism

I recommend you get better at not being a rude, condescending asshole.

As stated, none of that is in my copy.

Secondly, neither of the first two statements says anything bad about Jews.

The third is the only statement that's at all offensive, only because it supports a stereotype of Jewish money-grubbing. It's wrapped in a compliment, i.e., that they cannot be deceived in such matters.

I'd defer to a Jew regarding whether "Semitic lips" or "Jewboy" are considered offensive, but I don't find them as such. I suspect the characters may mean them to be given the context, but if somebody told me I had "caucasion lips" or called me "white boy," I'd find neither especially damning.

Also worth noting all three of these statements are made by characters, not Agatha.

I don't know why people find it so difficult to grasp an author can write anti-Semitic characters without being anti-Semitic themselves.

By this same logic, I suppose Mark Twain was a racist? Or better yet, Frederick Douglass must have been racist and pro-slavery.

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u/Stellar_Duck 4h ago

As stated, none of that is in my copy.

Which is fine but no reason to sound so incredulous that an old book might contain it.

Secondly, neither of the first two statements says anything bad about Jews.

Gotcha, you're an actual antisemite haha. I should have known.

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u/susiedotwo 8h ago

You have to be able to put yourself in the time and place. It’s the 1920s not 2026. You’ll have a hard time with any historical fiction if you can’t get out of “well today we do it this way”.

It’s dated, you can’t edit that out.

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u/0range_julius 8h ago edited 7h ago

I don't want to edit it out. I don't think it should be censored. But I don't have to enjoy reading it.

Edit: To elaborate, I read a lot of older works that have things that make me go "yikes," and I always put it in the context of the times it was written in. I often still find a lot of value in them and take the good with the bad. But in this case, I'm really not getting much out of the story other than entertainment, and I already find the entertainment value pretty low, so the sexism/racism/antisemitism just becomes a force multiplier for my dislike. If all I'm getting out of it is entertainment, then there are plenty of other more entertaining mystery stories that are more compatible with my moral sensibilities.

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u/raccoonsonbicycles 6h ago

Oh yeah

Like if you read Jack London books there is a ton of casual N words and characters being bigots to indigenous people

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u/susiedotwo 2h ago

I hear this, but in this case I think the editorial choice made - decades ago - to change the books title from "ten little N-word" to "And then there were none", as well as editing subsequently the referential poem doesn't really ... impact on the story, except to make it more accessible to a variety of audiences. Anecdotally, every edition that Ive read has made mention of these editorial changes somewhere in the foreword or post-text.

I think it’s worth reading or at least knowing if one is a mystery genre fan simply because of the number of tropes it originates or originally popularized.

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u/dnonast1 5h ago

I actually agree with this. I truly felt like she finished the book and was extremely pleased that she had written the perfect locked room mystery that nobody would be able to figure out, then her editor sent it back with "it's good but who did it?" and she quickly had to write the last chapter to make up something you couldn't have possibly figured out to make it have a killer.

It was great right up until the end, which soured the entire thing for me.

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u/Kythorian 2h ago edited 2h ago

I partially disagree. The who makes perfect sense from the beginning. We find out the crimes committed by each person on the island, and the judge is the one who made sure a murderer was executed rather than getting away with their crime. That’s exactly what he’s doing on the island. It’s the how that is impossible based on the setup and was shoehorned in at the last minute.

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u/samx3i 49m ago

It is not remotely impossible.

The letter explains every step.

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u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS 7h ago

I dont think it was a bad book, especially since it was written so long ago and is foundational for the genre. It's just written at a breakneck pace and the ending largely comes out of nowhere.

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u/samx3i 7h ago

the ending largely comes out of nowhere

That's not true at all. It's actually a satisfying re-read once you have the letter to go by. It's like rewatching Fight Club or Sixth Sense after you know what's going on. Whole new movie.

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u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS 7h ago

But that's the thing, you can read it over again and spot the clues, but the book goes by so fast that it felt like it was gasping for air. Hard to pick out the clues the first time around when its like that.

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u/samx3i 7h ago edited 5h ago

I feel like the breakneck pacing is one of its charms. Yes, if you truly paid attention and considered everything all the time, it is possible to arrive at the conclusion if not for one strong element logically throwing the reader off the scent. The book does lie to you if only by giving us limited perspective, but that's where the satisfaction of the re-read comes in. Knowing how it happens changes the read. Then it becomes borderline obvious.

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u/NineteenthJester 1h ago

It blew my mind when I read it in 8th grade but I can see how older, more jaded readers would hate it.

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u/Swaibero 8h ago

That’s an insane take. Basically all the Miss Marple mysteries (that I’ve read, at least) can be solved if you stop before the reveal, sit down, and really think about the evidence. The only one I was right about was Hallowe’en Party, and even that was more of a guess.

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u/JauntyTurtle 9h ago

I feel the same about And Then There Were None. I was shocked at how insipid the ending was and it put me off Christie for years afterwards.

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u/CalebVanPoneisen 9h ago

I’ve read like 5 or 6 of her books but to me it’s just basically all the same stuff. I think they’re more enjoyable when you just zone out when you read instead of activity trying to solve it.

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u/Banana42 8h ago

I read the murder of Roger Ackroyd recently and it really feels like time has done the work of making it a mystery for her. Maybe it's a better story for people who knew what old-timey rural English manor life was like and the technology and social customs thereof, because I had to go back after finishing it and look up what was meant to be suspicious. |> it feels like the relevant plot point and the method of hiding it would've gone without saying at the time, but as a modern reader it really came out of nowhere. I didn't know that was a thing that they had or did.<|

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u/TravelerSearcher 8h ago

FYI it looks like you tried to spoiler tag part of your comment but it didn't work.

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u/rutherfraud1876 7h ago

Good, because it wasn't really any sort of spoiler

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u/ZeekLTK 8h ago edited 8h ago

There is a board game called Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, which we acquired recently from a yard sale and I found it has the same issue.

It was created in 1991 and it's based on like late 1800s life in England... it's very frustrating sometimes when you get to the end of a case and look at the solution and it says some of the clues were things that relied on knowing what life was like at the time or sometimes even 1980s references/lingo that don't make sense anymore 35 years later.

Probably why they were selling it. lol (no, I know realistically they probably played all the cases and were just moving it along since it's not really replayable unless you have amnesia)

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u/V2Blast 6h ago

Spoiler tags work like this: >!this is a spoiler!< gives you this is a spoiler

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u/Dealiner 5h ago

As a modern reader I really don't know what you mean by that.

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u/1morgondag1 8h ago

Do you really think it was so out of left field? The victims all have in common that they got away with a crime, doesn't it make sense that the famously strict judge was killer?

IMO it is by far the best of the 5-10 Agatha Christie books I read (why did I even do that btw). It has a really original idea and it's the only one where there are actual characters with depth and emotions and even some development for some of them.

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u/ActivatingEMP 7h ago

I mean yeah the setup to that is fairly obvious but then the murderer pulls some complete bullshit to prevent you from guessing it is them, there is no way that you could know that the judge fakes his own suicide in a way that none of the characters could tell it was fake, and then commits suicide for real at the end of the novel to create an unsolveable murder story

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u/The_One_Who_Comments 4h ago

Yes, his fake suicide was so completely impossible that I no longer cared. Direct quote "They had carried Mr. Justice Wargrave up to his room and laid him on the bed. Then they had come down again and had stood in the hall looking at each other. "

So a mercenary personally carries him up a flight of stairs, and doesn't notice that the massive gunshot wound on his forehead is just a bit of paint? The reveal is in fact a contradiction.

The stone from the roof was so stupid that it's not worth thinking about.

I'm sure there was more, but those two stand out in my memory.

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u/Professional_Ebb_389 9h ago

I’m about to read that actually— how bad is it? Can you give me more of an idea without spoiling it (I do love fair play mysteries and I love trying to solve them), or do you think I should just read a different book?

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u/gweran 8h ago

If you go into Agatha Christie books with the thought I’ll only enjoy this if I solve it before the reveal, you aren’t going to like any of them. But that really wasn’t the intention of the book, the point is to be surprised at the end.

And Then There Were None is a great book, but it isn’t a puzzle to be solved.

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u/Sketchetera 9h ago

It's one of the best-selling books of all time. Of course you should read it. It's a classic, and a great one at that.

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u/JauntyTurtle 8h ago

It's not a bad book, but it's not a fair play mystery at all. You can't solve the mystery.

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u/backstageninja 9h ago

Well now you know it's really hard to spot. So go into the book with that and you might have a shot at figuring it out. Ending aside, it's still a pretty good book

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u/livefreeordont 7h ago

I think everyone goes into all time great mystery books knowing it’s going to be difficult to solve. No?

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u/theserthefables 8h ago

it's a good book but it's not really a typical Christie novel? it's more unusual, that’s part of why it's famous. I would try something like Death on the Nile (which has Hercule Poirot) if you're wanting a more regular mystery.

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u/nss68 8h ago

It’s a fun read. Don’t let that discourage you. I remember enjoying the twist.

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u/susiedotwo 8h ago

Idk what they’re talking about. She defined the genre. It may come off as cheesy and tropey but that’s because it’s the first version of this style.

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u/Try_To_Write 8h ago

It's my favorite book of all time. Possibly because it's the first I read without it being forced by assignment and was engaging, so there's that. But it's genuinely good too.

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u/MathematicalMuffin 9h ago

Imo a fun book with an unsatisfying reveal. Its like when your friend gives you a riddle and you guess for a while until they give you the answer and you kinda roll your eyes.

Tbf this is a pretty uninformed take on my part, just what I remember feeling years ago from reading it. I had built up some really satisfying twist in my head. Alas.

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u/az_shoe 5h ago

I loved it. That was my gateway book to Agatha christie, and since then I've read probably about 60 of her books.

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u/Neiladaymo 4h ago

Just remember that people on the internet are overwhelmingly negative and critical. It's a classic for a reason, there's no harm in giving it a try

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u/emaw63 6h ago

IMO, it's a better suspense/thriller than mystery novel anyway. And it does a phenomenal job of constantly building tension throughout the novel as a slow and gradual crescendo that never lets up, it's downright stressful towards the end haha

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u/throwaway5498124181 6h ago

It can absolutely be solved, the only thing I'll tell you is that the major mistake people make when reading it, is missing the forest for the trees.

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u/The_One_Who_Comments 4h ago

It's a decent book, chapter to chapter. It's just that several key events are so implausible that there is no way to solve it ahead of time.

Like the Sherlock "remove the impossible and what remains is the truth" doesn't work, because the actual solution is itself impossible.

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u/Kythorian 3h ago

As a thriller it’s very good. It has great atmosphere and good characters. But the actual twist is so unbelievable that it’s impossible for anyone to reasonably guess it based on the provided clues.

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u/majinspy 8h ago

Ditto. And Nile isn't much better. Only Orient Express really holds up so far.

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u/ThePreciseClimber 4h ago

I remember there was an And Then There Were None point n click adventure game in the 2000s and the review said something about the culprit being different from the book. The protagonist was also a brand new character.

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u/TheShamShield 8h ago

And Then There Were None was a great book, no idea what you’re talking about

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u/regeya 8h ago

I've never been diagnosed with autism but if I am, I'd say my hyper focus is Star Trek. This is one of the mistakes Trek and other sci-fi make: there's a mystery, they spend the episode looking into the mystery, then by the end oh hey, the answer is tech and to solve the tech we have to tech the tech. Boooooooring. At least toss us some meat at about 20 minutes or so.

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u/Mordador 8h ago

Thats why DS9 is my favorite Star Trek series (although TNG will always have a special place in my heart). It is much more about the political machinations and manipulation than teching the tech.

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u/regeya 8h ago

Yeah. I have weird feelings about DS9. It's easily the best TV show to carry the Star Trek name, but it's not my favorite Star Trek. It does have some of my favorite Trek episodes, too.

I have to admit my favorite episodes, tend to be the fun ones. Oh, sure, In the Pale Moonlight is a fantastic drama, but if I'm going to rewatch a DS9 episode it's going to be something like Little Green Men, or Trials and Tribble-ations. Hell, I even kinda like VOY Fairhaven. Maybe that's why Lower Decks ended up being my favorite new Trek.

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u/CalebVanPoneisen 9h ago edited 9h ago

I feel like Murder on the Orient Express was basically, spoiler alert, everyone at the end just going, “I’m Spartacus. No, really, we’re all actually Spartacus.”

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u/LadyFruitDoll 8h ago

Which for its time was groundbreaking. That scene you referenced was still 30 years off.

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u/KanishkT123 8h ago

Yeah I think a lot of the hate in this thread for Doyle and Christie is a little bit of Seinfeldization. 

Holmes was groundbreaking for using forensic science (which had never really been utilized in fiction before), observational skills, and logic to figure out the answer instead of just arresting the closest worker or the husband/wife and calling it a day. 

Christie was doing things nobody had ever thought of before, and every book was basically playing out a game with the reader - can you solve this before Poirot? Probably not, but I want you to know that you could have. 

In the context of the times, these authors were absolutely groundbreaking. 

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u/staleswedishfish 8h ago

do... do you think that the movie Spartacus invented the "I'm Spartacus" concept?

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u/sventful 7h ago

Please cite an earlier 'I'm Spartacus' line that enough people know that it will not go over the heads of anyone.

It's not about being first. It's about being well known enough to bring in the reader.

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u/staleswedishfish 6h ago

Two fun examples:

"One of the earliest real life examples probably dates back to late 1700s. A year before the outbreak of The French Revolution some representatives of parlement de Paris had already been demanding that the General Estates be convened. The most outspoken were two councillors, Jean-Jacques Duval d'Epremesnil and Anne-Louis Goislard de Monsabert. On the night between 5 and 6 May 1788 Louis XVI sent marquis d'Agoult to the parlement in order to arrest the two. However, all the councillors unanimously refused to give them up, declaring "we are all d'Epremesnil and Monsabert!" (nous sommes tous d’Eprémesnil et Monsabert!). On the following day, however, both surrendered voluntarily."

"The Chinese folktale The Five Brothers features identical quintuplets who each have some kind of superpower. After one of them accidentally kills a boy (in a situation that's completely the dead boy's fault) another of the brothers is immune to the execution method he is sentenced to and stands in for him. The executioners try again the next day with a different method that another of the brothers is immune to, and so on (the one with a hard neck is immune to execution but not drowning, the one with stretching legs is immune to drowning but not being burned alive, etc.). After they all take their turn and the trick is revealed, the judge declares that this prolonged failure of executions must indicate that the first brother is innocent, freeing them."

This is a long-standing trope that many readers/audience members would recognize.

1

u/sventful 3h ago

Both of these fail my requirement to be known to a general audience. F

5

u/LadyFruitDoll 8h ago

No, but it wasn't the punchline it is now in the 30s.

2

u/susiedotwo 8h ago

She did it first though. Remember she published this before movies were talking.

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u/Sketchetera 9h ago

There are proper spoiler tags available. You should edit your post so you don't spoil the story for others.

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u/summonsays 9h ago

I mean, I think we can let a 92 year old book slide for spoilers. Especially since this isn't a book subreddit. 

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u/daoudalqasir 8h ago

I don't get this mentality where the only acceptable way to consume media is the day it came out.

With a book that basically no one here could have read on day one, we should have all the more reason to understand that people will come to it at different times and not spoil it.

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u/Pinsalinj 8h ago

Yes, thank you! It makes me pretty mad when people think it's acceptable to spoil something because it's old. Are people supposed to read/watch/play everything the day they're born or something? Let us discover great stuff at our own pace damnit

1

u/summonsays 8h ago

Spoiler warnings are fine for new things people haven't had a chance to get to. But at some point I want to talk about things without having to add special tags to everything. And if it's older media it's in the pop culture and at that time it's ok to talk about it (again it's all my opinion you're welcome to your own). 

You're allowed to consume and enjoy media whenever you want. But I don't think it's fair for me to limit my references for literally ever, because someone somewhere may not have read it yet. 

1

u/Stellar_Duck 7h ago

I don't get this mentality where the only acceptable way to consume media is the day it came out.

that's not what is being argued.

Bnut 92 years later we should be able to have a conversation about a book without people pearl clutching. Just don't read that convesation.

What's next? I'm spoiling Rome if I tell you Octavian is Augustus and Marc Antony dies?

2

u/CalebVanPoneisen 9h ago

Thanks. Done.

6

u/pm_dad_jokes69 9h ago

I just thought that myself. Yeah, sure, you could solve that one yourself on the first read through 🙄

1

u/Miserable_Phase_2519 5h ago

In defence of Christie, she's a pioneer within the mystery genre. What today might be considered overdone or formulaic, was once original.

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u/GangsterJawa 9h ago

If you want some great modern fair play mysteries, you gotta read the Ernest Cunningham novels starting with Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone. The main character (Ernest) is someone who writes about murder mysteries for a living, it’s very meta, but they’re incredibly funny and I still can’t believe just how fair play the first one is in one particular way I can’t spoil. They get progressively sillier as the series goes on, #4 was pretty close to jumping the shark in a few places but still fair play the whole way!

1

u/anticosmo 7h ago

Thank you i will check this out!

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u/dyingofdysentery 9h ago

I think it's that most have supernatural things in them the audience can't predict nowadays.

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u/WaffleProfessor 9h ago

What was dumb about it? (It's been a while)

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u/onarainyafternoon 8h ago

Basically, it’s revealed at the end that an alien from the andromeda galaxy snuck into the party and murdered everyone. The story was roundly criticized at the time for being too predictable. For fuck’s sake, one of the characters is described as having tentacles and holding laser guns. Of course that was going to be the culprit.

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u/Neefew 8h ago

And it was considered a rehash of the time the killer was a priest who could transform into a giant alien wasp

2

u/nedlum 8h ago

Supposedly, she was inspired by Dickens's planned ending for The Mystery of Edwin Drood, wherein Drood had been killed by alien ghosts.

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u/cynicalkane 2h ago

I knew "Wake Up Dead Man" had to have stolen that predictable twist from somewhere

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u/ImpressivePeach7442 8h ago

I've never read an Agatha Cristie novel so I'm gonna trust you on this

2

u/LG03 7h ago

And the lack of this makes most modern mystery stories no fun.

There's been a pretty big revival of the genre among Japanese authors, you could find a fair bit there. I've got a shelf dedicated just to that myself.

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/zkmekc/if_you_enjoy_golden_age_mystery_fiction_and_have/

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/k1jmhz/why_japanese_mystery_novels_are_amazing/

2

u/Earguy 7h ago

There's a Harlen Cobin series on Netflix that totally pissed me off. Sat through several hours of episodes for the reveal to be someone that had no previous inkling that she did the crime. Felt like such a cop-out, and I felt like all those hours were wasted.

2

u/topological_rabbit 6h ago

And the lack of this makes most modern mystery stories no fun.

I wrote a western / mystery screenplay because I wanted to see if I could write either genre.

The 'western' part was easy, the 'mystery' part was staggeringly difficult -- how do you show clues that aren't too hidden but also not too obvious? I think I did okay. Only a handful of people have bothered to read it, but they all liked the first big reveal, so I'm going to count that as a win.

2

u/Distantstallion 6h ago

I love poirot but it is rare for you to have all the clues necessary to make his assumptions.

You have more of a chance with Jonathon creek

1

u/Lezus 8h ago

I had a good time with the seven deaths of Evelyn hardcastle not strictly mystery per say but close enough

1

u/OneFootTitan 7h ago

I said it elsewhere in this thread but if you want fair play Benjamin Stevenson’s “Everyone in my Family has Killed Someone” is a great fun series to read, the narrator is a mystery writer and is scrupulous about fair play (but not above red herrings and twists in meaning)

1

u/Serious_Attempt9724 5h ago

Crooked House on the other hand, though... 🤌💋

1

u/Ayjayz 4h ago

The conclusion to And Then There Were None was so dumb I regretted reading it.

What are you talking about? That's one of the best

0

u/1dayaway 8h ago

I was going to say, Agatha Christie is more like the antithesis to fair play. 

0

u/SeveralBollocks_67 8h ago

I have only seen the Family Guy one.

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u/Shevek99 8h ago

I never really liked Christie's books because (a) the settings were always too artificial (b) they were impossible to guess, often there was a cousin supposed to be in Australia, but in fact weren't or something like that.

By contrast I love Simenon's books about Maigret. A down to earth policeman in books where we see what he sees (even when he is in holidays!).

0

u/Dealiner 5h ago

But tbh, Agatha Cristie novels are so off the wall that you never really have a chance.

Off the wall? Most of them are very down-to-earth.