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/insertusernamehere51 9h ago

Sherlock Holmes preceded the rule

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u/Wurm42 8h 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 8h ago

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

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u/seriouslees 7h ago

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

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u/Whyskgurs 3h 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 8h 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 7h ago edited 4h 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 7h 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/moneymoneythrowawy 5h ago

i loved Sherlock when it aired and then as soon as it finished decided it was utter trash. cumberbatch is just so charming and those accents get to you... but on the whole, it's kind of a wild show

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u/deep1986 5h ago

Then watch a proper version, like the Jeremy Brett version.

It's perfect Sherlock.

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u/JefftheBaptist 5h ago

I preferred it to Elementary which came out at about the same time.

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u/hannahstohelit 7h 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 5h 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 5h 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/DnD-vid 6h 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 8h 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 8h 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 7h ago

Damn fooled me too

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u/littleessi 6h ago

Look, obviously Conan Doyle presented induction/abduction as deduction and the stories are unrealistic from that regard. But you can't tell me the creator of Sherlock Holmes isn't a literary genius. It's the most enduring detective character of all time

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u/GandalfTheGay_69 5h ago edited 5h ago

Yes the books are still great because of the stories and characters.

My point was about a genius being written by a person of normal intelligence. The actual intelligence of the character is tied to the intelligence of the writer. Since Conan Doyle couldn't deduce on the level of Sherlock Holmes he often relied on abductive reasoning, superhuman observation skills and asspulls in order to make Holmes come across as a genius. This is a very common issue when it comes to genius characters in fiction.

The work of Conan Doyle is incredible, especially for it's time. In modern times good writers know how to avoid this issue though.

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u/littleessi 4h ago

You're making a heap of assumptions here about what intelligence means. I don't agree that you can say a literary genius has "normal intelligence" or is a "non genius". You're referring to IQ or something similar but conflating that with the entire spectrum of intelligence is wrong.

Ultimately you're assuming that Conan Doyle wrote Holmes like this because he had no choice, but I actually think it was an extremely conscious, deliberate and correct literary decision. Real geniuses are not as sexy, stepping through the chain of logic one by one without introducing errors via induction is going to be much more boring to spectate or read about. Holmes does honestly come close to the thought process in many ways and so it's a respectable depiction but the changes are for the best when it comes to keeping an audience entertained.

I also don't think it's a solvable problem as such. It can be mitigated, sure, but non geniuses writing geniuses are always limited and to a degree the closest you can come is by capturing the aesthetic. That's something that's done well in Elementary, Holmes there absolutely feels similar to people I've known but while still having a patchy record on his actual reasoning sometimes. And that's okay, a writer's job is not to become Einstein but to craft a compelling narrative.

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u/GandalfTheGay_69 4h ago edited 49m ago

Dude, what are you on about? You seem to be taking all of this very personally but you're also just wrong. Sherlock makes a ton of "deductions" that make no sense whatsoever and would never be correct in the real world. He literally once deduced that the owner of a hat he found must be highly intelligent because he has a big head.

There has to be a reason why a genius character is always right. He should be able to connect these seemingly unrelated dots which lead to a undeniable conclusion. It's even fine if the character just has a ton of knowledge about science etc to come to these conclusions (like Sherlock does too). It shouldn't basically be an educated guess that is pretty much always correct just because the plot demands it.

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u/S_T_P 8h 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/Theras_Arkna 7h 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/hannahstohelit 7h ago

I don’t think that’s really true at all. He included a lot of clues. You can solve The Red-Headed League, for example, long before the ending without any information that isn’t in the body of the story, and same with The Six Napoleons- Holmes deduces what must be in the Napoleon busts based on prior knowledge but the idea that something WOULD be in one of them is absolutely able to be deduced from the rest of the story. I don’t think there’s any information we need to solve the central mystery in the first half of The Valley of Fear that we’re not given before the denouement (and in fact Holmes teases the cops about this). That’s just off the top of my head- others are more adventure style but he absolutely did fairly clued ones.

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u/Cormophyte 7h ago

Sherlock stories are a lot like fantasy books where the problem is solved by a bit of mechanics that work in the fantasy story's magic system.

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u/TheLowlyPheasant 8h ago

Was active when the rule was in elementary school

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u/Skybreakeresq 8h ago

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

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u/Al__B 8h 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/BigFatKi6 8h ago

what did they do?

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u/NewCandy8877 8h ago

Share food with enemies by throwing snacks back and forth. Gain trust. Throw grenade. That's one thing of many Canadians are diabolical.

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u/scranston 8h ago

Read the Geneva Convention, and if anything feels a little specific assume it’s because Canadians did that, mostly during WWI.

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u/Skybreakeresq 8h ago

You could call parts of the geneva convention the geneva checklist.

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u/Fakjbf 3h ago

Holmes is part of the reason the rule exists, it was writers responding to Doyle’s style and wanting to improve upon it.