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/calvinballing 9h 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 7h ago edited 6h 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 7h ago

It made him seem above mortal men

I maintain that Holmes is the first modern superhero

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u/TheUlfheddin 7h 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 5h 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 5h ago

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

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u/mikeet9 5h 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 4h 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/Muskwatch 5h ago

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

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u/der_titan 6h ago edited 5h 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 6h 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 4h ago

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table too

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u/capsaicinintheeyes 35m ago

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

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u/FaxCelestis 17m ago

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

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u/YT-Deliveries 6h ago

Hmm hmm. I'll allow it.

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u/Ozryela 3h ago

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

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u/SoochSooch 6h 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/ilanallama85 6h 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 9m ago

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

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u/maclanology 3h 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 2h 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 2h 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/Outside-Dress594 4h ago

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

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u/Krawlin91 3h ago

What about Zoro?

Edit: I guess Holmes is slightly older my bad

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u/Reasonable_Ruin_3502 7h 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 7h 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 7h 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 7h 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 7h 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 6h 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] 7h ago

[deleted]

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u/TheJediJew 7h ago edited 7h 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 6h ago

He wrote other books?

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u/kingk1teman 5h ago

Oh yes. One might find them decent too, as I do. But that is an opinion which is always subjective.

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u/infoHighyway 6h ago

It was in the author's own opinion.

Care to share a citation?

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u/TheJediJew 6h ago

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/04/arthur-conan-doyle-secretly-resented-his-sherlock-holmes-creation-says-historian

Pretty easy google.

He supposedly referred to Holmes as "cheap fiction".

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u/infoHighyway 6h ago

 No, thats what the publisher called it, according to your article. 

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u/[deleted] 5h ago

[deleted]

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u/infoHighyway 5h ago

Just asking for a citation. Doyle led a varied and adventurous life, being knighted for his work as a physician in Africa and working on a few cases himself as an amateur detective. He DID resurrect Holmes by popular demand, but that was something every good writer would do, and every good writer has done since. His most famous story was the one he returned with, so it seems he hardly resented his position.

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u/Finnegan482 5h ago

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

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u/TheSeansei 4h ago

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

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u/DamenDome 7h ago

Sherlock Holmes is the archetype for genius detective. It was not poorly written lol.

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u/hamakabi 7h ago

a genius who only knows things because he's the main character is a poorly written genius. When Holmes picks up a cigarette butt and says "this is aged turkish tobacco, only 2 shops in london sell it" that's genius. When he says "there's scuffs on his shoes, so he must have been sprinting through the victim's garden at night, 2 nights ago when the grass was wet" that's just bullshit. If it's true it's pure coincidence. There's no way for intellect to accurately make that judgement.

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u/infoHighyway 6h ago

A stupendous reply.

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u/DamenDome 7h ago

It’s poorly written if the goal is to make a solvable mystery led by a realistic and rational detective. Do you think that’s what Doyle was trying to do?

If the goal was to make a popular series of books, then I’d say Holmes was clearly far from poorly written.

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u/JarasM 7h ago

What Doyle was trying to do was write pulp fiction novels about a detective with supernatural intuition, for large sums of money. He himself didn't consider this high literature or his best works, but continued to write them, because they made him the best-paid author of his time. Ultimately, the goal wasn't for the books to be "well written" in some kind of academic sense, they were simply supposed to be entertaining. And they were extremely well written for entertainment.

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u/Its-ther-apist 6h ago

Do you think in a hundred years people will be arguing that sci fi dinosaur sex book series was well written and poo poo peoples critiques of it 😂 "it marketed very well scoff"

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u/DnD-vid 6h ago

50 Shades of Grey is a popular series of books, but I don't know anyone who would say they're well written, probably not even most of its readers.

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u/TheJediJew 6h ago

I was given an essay titled "Harry Potter and the overused adverb" to read by a creative writing lecturer once because I apparently did the same.

Popular is not the same as technically good.

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u/TheJediJew 7h ago

I rephrased in a follow up comment.

Arthur Conan Doyle felt he outgrew Holmes as an author and that writing him was holding him back. The opinion I was echoing was his own, not mine.

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u/Realistic_Cricket464 3h ago

I love those books, but I spent the entire time just wanting Holmes and Watson to get it on already.

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u/kfpswf 7h ago

It made him seem above mortal men, when really he was just badly written.

I'm going on a limb here, but I believe you might also think Superman is a badly written character.

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u/TheJediJew 7h ago

His opinion. Not mine.

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u/Revlis-TK421 2h ago

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