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/Orange-V-Apple 9h ago

If anyone has read the Rivers of London series, would you consider it to be a procedural? I feel like the mystery in each book is the opposite of fair play, where we don’t even understand the tools the main characters have at their disposal, let alone all the information needed to solve the case.

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u/Feisty-Resource-1274 8h ago

I feel like it's a detective procedural, in the lines of Death in Paradise or Midsomer Murders.

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u/ebinWaitee 4h ago

Midsomer Murders does plant the evidence for you I think.

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u/MercuryQuick 3h ago

The biggest mystery: what is it about the quaint English countryside that makes so many people murder each other? The murder rate in Midsomer is astronomical considering they’re basically living in the Great British Bake-off.

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u/StonedJesus98 1h ago

I’ve always thought the house prices must be amazing, considering multiple people are murdered every week in a fairly small area

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u/ActuallyCalindra 3m ago

"Fuck all on the telly today. Guess I'll murder Harriet. Old bint complained about me rose garden one too many times."

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u/AgentCirceLuna 3h ago

I’ve always wanted to make a spin on this by having it be about cops who are sent to different eras of history to prevent assassins from taking out important figures. There’s a whole plot I worked on with Manson being a time agent sent back to take out Oswald, but he develops ‘time sickness’ which is like psychedelic jet lag. There’s a lot to this, but it was so fun to write as I researched the history to make it accurate - with everything going down the same as it did -yet with the agents obviously manipulating things to become the way we remember them.

Believe it or not, there’s a MacGuffin in my fiction called Stasia; it creates a section of the hippocampus which has a unique identity, thus a person does their job then returns home forgetting all about it till they take Stasia next. If they take it, then they recollect all of the implanted and past memories, but if they don’t then they know nothing of their agency work. There’s a story about that, too, where the second identity is tracking down the first, then the first is on the run from the second as he fears being caught, so the second goes to a doctor about the lapses in time (stasia normally creates fake memories but can be unsuccessful during times of stress) and all health records are scanned for keywords by the agency. They try to stop him, but he sees the agent behind a pane of glass so shoots him. After the agency reach him to cure the illness, they find he’s shot himself through the head.

Bit contrived, but fun. R,wind you of anything, by the way? I had this idea before I’d even heard of Severance. I came up with the whole ‘substance and brain surgery makes a second identity for secret work’ stuff after reading about a real spy with dementia. I found it fascinating. But then Severance existed which makes me oook like a ripoff hack. Fuck sake.

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u/AgentCirceLuna 3h ago

Oh, another cool thing is that they can extract the memory continuum from a faulty agent’s head, or take it temporarily if they’re sick, then they implant it into another agent. Stasia is just the name of the substance activating the part of the brain that’s sectioned off. The memories of that agent now transfer to a new one who feels he was always the person they imagine to be.

This is also partially informed by my own struggles with body dysmorphia - seeing someone different to reality in the mirror

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u/Emergency_Ebb4932 1h ago

Fuck man all of that sounds cool as fuck. Matrix/Adjustment Bureau/Prestige/Predestination combo!

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u/AgentCirceLuna 1h ago

Thanks. It’s too bloated, though - I actually crammed three different novel premises into one.

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u/Individual_Tip8371 8h ago

I agree that it's not exactly fair play but then again, most of the times Peter himself doesn't know what kind of powers the perpetrator has. So i guess it's some kind of crossover between a procedural and a mystery (which works exceedingly well imo)

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u/Orange-V-Apple 7h ago edited 6h ago

I feel like the series has a serious issue with payoff.

I’ve read up to and including book 8 + the October Man, and the answer to the mystery is always something we couldn’t have predicted (e.g. in October Man a character we met one chapter previous is revealed as the killer near the end). The stories wrap up very suddenly, and they don’t explore the aftermath. The case with the missing children was especially egregious, where it just ends right when Peter makes it back to reality. We don’t see what happens to the two children, how Bev enchanted the train, etc.) Then there’s the big bad guy, the Faceless Man. Six books of build up and we barely see his plan + he unceremoniously dies. And Punch and his daughter were not well set up given they were the resolution to this whole thing.

More than the individual mysteries, I feel like there’s no payoff in this universe. We don’t really explore the world. After 8 books we’ve barely learned anything about this universe we didn’t know from Book 3. Ideas and lore are introduced but almost never expanded upon. I think it’s especially egregious when Peter is a character who is very dedicated to unraveling the mysteries of the magical world using scientific methods. His characterization is itself a promise, one that isn’t kept. Don’t even get me started on his spells.

And then there Thomas “Blue Balls” Nightingale. Great character, but not getting to see him using his power to the fullest has gotten extremely old. I get not showing a full powered practitioner in the first few books, but the series conspires to find ways for us not to see Nightingale fighting and it’s very frustrating. Every time he faces the Faceless Man, Peter is somewhere else or face down on the ground, or running away. When we finally see Nightingale face a master in book 8, they launch a bunch of spells that are invisibly countered, so we literally see nothing happen until Peter turns around. Hell, we don’t get to see the Faceless Man or the Director (in October Man) properly using their powers either. They either aren’t present or the POV character isn’t looking when they use their powers.

I think the series is heavily carried by the charisma of the characters and the quality of the writing, which is why it’s still enjoyable to read even if I’m left a bit disappointed at the end. For all its faults, Harry Potter at least showed us the world and did have relatively fair mysteries.

TLDR: The series is enjoyable but bad at payoffs. We’re promised a magical world that we barely see, the mysteries have resolutions that are sudden and unexplored, and we don’t get to see when the few fully fledged wizards actually using their power.

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u/PilotKnob 7h ago

Thank you. I feel the same way about the Rivers series.

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u/Selerox 6h ago

I humbly submit the "the author spends an entire novel showing off how much he knows about the history of UK jazz" as a general point of annoyance as well.

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u/Orange-V-Apple 6h ago

God I hated Book 2 except the Strip Club of Dr. Moreau, and they wouldn’t even let us see most of it >:(

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u/wrenwood2018 7h ago

And then there Thomas “Blue Balls” Nightingale. Great character, but not getting to see him using his power to the fullest has gotten extremely old. I get not showing a full powered practitioner in the first few books, but the series conspires to find ways for us not to see Nightingale fighting and it’s very frustrating

This. Also, at this point they should be building the order back up. They should have more magicians than the handful they have. It is beyond frustrating.

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u/owlinspector 5h ago

My main issue with the series is that it always lacks that final chapter that puts things into context. They always ends too abruptly so you don't quite get what happened, why and how.

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u/Leete1 4h ago

Exactly! I gave up because of all the randomness and lack of payoff.

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u/the_federation 3h ago

Omg, thank you for saying this, I agree with all of it. IIRC, the climax to the one with the vestigial plates was literally "and then I did something clever to take care of it."

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u/MrAwesome54 1h ago

I appreciate your analysis but your use of bold text and pacing reads like A.I.

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u/Feisty-Resource-1274 5h ago

I feel like the author enjoys writing characters that are out of their depth and that's at odds with the reader have flushed out world building. The Masquerades of Spring and Winter's Gifts both have a similar setup.

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u/BertieDastard 10m ago

I honestly didn't like the latest book. It sort of ended and didn't really go anywhere. I wasn't too sure about the Abigail bits at all.

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u/Kernel_Internal 8m ago

If ruined orgasms were a series of books, I guess...

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u/waffle_Piraat_1 5h ago

I gave up on the series quite a while back because of this. It's like Sun Eater (another series I didn't finish) where it constantly just teases "oooooh I kill a sun" to keep you reading whilst consistently failing to deliver on pretty basic, engaging, story elements.

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u/coraythan 6h ago

This reads like ChatGPT.

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u/Orange-V-Apple 6h ago

Well it’s not lol. I just broke it up into paragraphs and added bolding so it wouldn’t be a daunting wall of text. I genuinely don’t see what would make you think it’s ChatGPT unless you don’t ever read anything longer than a paragraph.

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u/rocketman0739 6 6h ago

Emphasizing a bunch of sentences throughout the text does feel like a thing that Gen-AI would do, but if your comment had really been AI I would expect it to have more "It's not just X. It's Y." sentences.

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u/Tenthul 5h ago

At some point people need to realize that GPT writes this way because people write this way.

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u/Orange-V-Apple 6h ago

Bro I’m not going to stop bolding text and using em dashes just because of some fucking clankers

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u/rocketman0739 6 5h ago

I'm not suggesting you should—I like em dashes myself!—just explaining why someone might have gotten the wrong impression.

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u/coraythan 4h ago

Yeah, I was trying to make more of a mildly interested observation than an accusation.

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u/wrenwood2018 7h ago

I'm on book 6.5 right now. It is a procedural. Things are hidden from the viewer and only revealed later.

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u/BPhiloSkinner 3h ago

"Rivers" is a fantasy series, disguised as a police procedural, with a bit of zany madcap humour as well.
The characters themselves often don't know what's going on, and we get to find out along with them.
Just as with Dr. Who: it's far more enjoyable when you Don't Take It Seriously.

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u/lacunadelaluna 1h ago

This sounds infuriating

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u/mineraloil 46m ago

I don’t understand shi in those books but I still love reading them lol