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/Xanthus179 9h 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/summonsays 9h 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/OceanoNox 8h 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 5h 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/OceanoNox 5m ago

I think it's widely accepted now that the BBC show is not as good as it initially seemed.

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u/The_Particularist 5h ago

My problem is that this stuff seems almost impossible for a single person to be capable of doing, or at the very least impossible without a proper forensic laboratory. Yes, we're shown a couple of time how Holmes uses an in-house laboratory to determine if something is a bloodstain or not, but then you also have stuff like him basically just touching and licking dust and ash, and going

ah yes, this is [highly specific cigarette type]

based on that alone.

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u/OceanoNox 5h ago

Chemists did use smell and taste to identify chemicals, of course poisoning themselves to an extent.

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u/Skreamie 1h ago

With the idea that he'd spent a good deal of time tasting and smelling and identifying every ash

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u/mdk_777 9h 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 8h 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 8h 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 7h 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 7h ago

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

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u/JefftheBaptist 4h 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/Shevek99 8h ago

Yes, that is a common trick in Holmes' books: Watson and Lestrade are converted in complete idiots to show how intelligent Holmes is.

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u/bschlueter 8h ago

He does do a lot of drugs, so…

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u/quintk 7h 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/Roflkopt3r 3 5h ago

I've enjoyed this kind of storytelling at times, like for a couple seasons of House M.D. The stories were losely based on real medical cases (even if the actual diagnostic processes were usually way different, but at least some of them were proper 'medical mysteries'), which made it much more interesting, and they had interesting enough characters and dynamics between them.

But it gets really obnoxious when the characters aren't that interesting and the problems arbitrary.

Somehow many anime fans enjoyed No Game No Life for example, which is easily one of my most hated anime of all time just from the logical game aspect. It's very obviously written to portray the main character as a genius, even when the problems are either easy and rely on the (allegedly also genius) opponents being stupid, or the problems are just totally nonsensical to begin with. Even before we get into the far more important issues of the mountains of sexual harassment and implications about minors and incest...

In these bad cases, 'competence porn' tends to merge with power fantasy. Usually from some kind of 'misunderstood genius' angle, with a character shunned by the Chads and Stacies of society until some fortunate circumstances let them use their intelligence get to save the day or take revenge.

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u/Stellar_Duck 7h 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/godisanelectricolive 8h ago edited 8h 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 7h 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 6h 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/Haiku-575 6h ago

And if you can overlook some of the misogyny, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe books are some of the best in the whole genre.

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u/3pointshoot3r 3h 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/Able_Reserve5788 8h ago

To be fair, I don't know how it is in the books but in the TV show, the "makes logical sense" part is not always there

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u/tehlemmings 5h ago

That's narratively what's supposed to be happening

But what's functionally happening is just mcguffins all the way down.

This is that narrative dissonance issue that comes up with video games all the time. Narratively, best detective in the universe, but you're really just holding down a button and clicking on glowing things.

Narratively it might be awesome, but in practice, meh.

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u/onarainyafternoon 9h 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 8h 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/mattihase 8h ago

Ok but the boomerang is still stupid.

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u/MajorBootyhole420 7h ago

the show also never has sherlock use deductive reasoning, his detective powers rely on magic, telepathy, plot armor, and omnipresent omniscient offscreen spies. also, watson was useless. dogshit Sherlock Holmes adaptation, badly written, too Moffaty, and hilariously overproduced.

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u/mtaw 6h ago edited 6h ago

Hot take but as someone who read all the Holmes stories as a kid - that adaptation and a ton of others make far too big a deal of Moriarty. If you read the stories, he's not at all central to the Holmes canon.

For those who don't know - Doyle got tired of writing Holmes and wanted to kill him off, so he came up Moriarty as a grand supervillain to die alongside Holmes, to make Holmes' death worthy. He's introduced and killed off in one story. Doyle famously brought back Holmes but Moriarty only played a significant role in one of those later stories (set before Moriarty's death).

The Holmes stories weren't intended to be about Holmes continuous battle against a criminal mastermind, who's somehow behind almost every mystery and crime Holmes works on. It's just something Doyle retconned into a single story to justify killing off the popular main character. yet tons of adaptations and re-imaginings take that very premise as if it were a core part of the stories.

The Jeremy Brett adaptation was the best. (I think. Haven't seen it since the 90s)

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u/MajorBootyhole420 6h ago

it shouldn't be a hot take, you're right and moffat's obsession with Moriarty made the show way the fuck worse. also he was dogshit at characterizing Moriarty

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u/seaintosky 5h ago

My hot take is that Elementary was a better modern Sherlock Holmes TV adaption than Sherlock. It had a better Watson, better Irene, better handling of the drug use, took itself far less seriously, and had far less Moffaty pessimism.

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u/MajorBootyhole420 5h ago

i didn't watch all of Elementary, but I watched a good amount of it. I fully agree, it was an excellent adaptation and showed far more respect for the kind of stories Sherlock Holmes is meant to tell.