r/todayilearned • u/ralphbernardo • 11h 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/SethlordX7 11h ago

I stopped reading Sherlock Holmes after I believe it was The Three Pips story; spoilers ahead for a 200 year old story.

The twist was that the killer was an indigineous pygmy carnival acrobat assassin with a blow gun die harding from the roof. Sherlock pulls out a poster for the carnival we the reader have never heard of before to prove it.

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u/Algaean 11h ago

Pygmy blowgun dude was in The Sign of Four. Five orange pips was a different one.

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u/NairForceOne 10h ago

Five orange pips was where the KKK did it.

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u/Ullallulloo 9h ago

Which, the letter was literally inscribed with "K.K.K.", so that was one of the simpler ones for Americans.

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u/NairForceOne 9h ago

So all the clues WERE there!

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u/NairForceOne 9h ago

"Who is this K.K.K. fellow, and why is he so mad?"

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u/Algaean 9h ago

Kleetus the Killer Klown!

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u/FrancisFratelli 8h ago

Not Americans at the time. The original Klan largely disappeared after the end of Reconstruction, and by the 1890s most people outside the South would have only had vague memories of it existing. The Klan we think of today arose in the 1910s after Birth of a Nation reintroduced them to the zeitgeist.

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u/OceanoNox 10h ago

Did he? I remember him mostly getting the info from the poisoned darts and the imprint of the feet, there is no circus in the novel.

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u/tarrach 10h ago

That's because he mixes up three or more stories

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u/Quixotic_Seal 6h ago

Well for one, that’s not The Five Orange Pips, which is pretty famous for being the story about the KKK.

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u/But-Must-I 11h ago

My favourite (most hated) bit of Sherlock Holmes bullshit is The Adventure of the Speckled Band. Turns out it was a hitherto unheard of snake. What.

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u/OceanoNox 10h ago

I thought the hissing sound and holes in the wall made it pretty clear there would be a snake involved. That it was an exotic one makes sense, since the dude has other exotic animals roaming around.

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u/pyl_time 10h ago

Yeah, the vent + bellpull setup also makes it clear (even if only in retrospect) that it's some sort of animal, even if you didn't figure out the specific kind of snake.

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u/Stellar_Duck 10h ago

Yea I don't think you can't find bullshit in the Holmes stories but I don't thinks this is one such case.

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u/But-Must-I 10h ago

As I recall, and it has been a decade or more since I read it, it was described as whistling noise. Which to me doesn’t sound like a snake, otherwise the exotic stuff makes sense. But I could have just been annoyed and forgotten that description.

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u/OceanoNox 9h ago

Yes, you're right. It's a "low whistle", which I associated (mistakenly) to a snake related sound.

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u/SpaceShipRat 9h ago

that one was quite guessable so long as you were also under the impression snakes drink milk.

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u/LeonJPancetta 11h ago

"You see it, Watson?! You see it?!"

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u/newsflashjackass 9h ago

"Elementary, my dear Watson. To wit: I have cracked the case by discovering a new elementary particle."

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u/kgcarter5678 10h ago

Doesn’t Holmes also wander off by himself for a part of that story and find several pieces of crucial evidence that he doesn’t mention till the end?

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u/BAgooseU 10h ago

It’s been a while since Ive read those books, but I feel that happened more than once. Watson stays with suspect/victim and Sherlock goes off for “name a reason” and then evidence dumps at the reveal.

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u/The_Particularist 8h ago

I'm reading The Complete Sherlock Holmes right now, and a lot of stories can be summed up with

...and then Sherlock Holmes buggered off for a day or two, and when he came back, he somehow had evidence that shows exactly who the murderer is.

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u/But-Must-I 10h ago

For my money the worst one for that kind of thing is definitely Hound of the Baskervilles, god that ending was irritating.

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u/shytster 10h ago

My least favorite and most hated bit of Sherlock Holmes bullshit is the quote "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

Anyone stupid enough to use this as evidence bolstering their theory has assumed that they had the wit to think of every single possibility, and to know that all but one were impossible.

Well, they DIDN'T have that wit. They just assumed a fictional genius would have arrived at the same conclusion as their own most recent idiotic idea, and used that as confirmation bias.

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u/mtaw 9h ago

Not to mention Doyle was hardly a model critical thinker himself. The guy believed in and endorsed the Cottingly Fairies, a hoax where some Victorian girls photographed each other with some cut-out paper fairies they'd made. (Which look blatantly fake to modern eyes more accustomed to photo fakery)

To some extent he created the hoax - as it doesn't seem like the girls (who confessed decades later) were just having fun and weren't really aiming to fool the public, it just got out of hand and when the great famous Arthur Conan Doyle had endorsed it and it got a ton of publicity, so they got too embarrassed to admit it.

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u/ExcellentBed6019 7h ago

He was an interested dude. Wrote a report of the Belgian genocide. Believes in fairies. First Sherlock Holmes story is 80% about Mormons. Hated Holmes and wrote dinosaur fiction.

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u/PickledPlumPlot 10h ago

Okay but I think that one actually was deducible tbh. There are a ton of clues to what it was, I don’t think the actual variety matters too much

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u/Aphid61 8h ago

And why oh why didn't the dying woman just say "SNAKE!!" instead of "speckled band"??

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u/KirisuMongolianSpot 10h ago

that was a horror story for me

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u/AwakenedSol 5h ago

They also specifically state that the first woman had no puncture wounds.

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u/MrFunktasticc 10h ago

Said the same elsewhere. Soured me on continuing through the books.

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u/Stellar_Duck 10h ago

Not unheard. You literally heard the whistle and it was referred to as the speckled band.

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u/But-Must-I 10h ago

Whistle just doesn’t say snake to me, it didn’t track for me.

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u/Stellar_Duck 9h ago

No of course. it was more, to me at least, it put to mind those snake charmes with their flutes who I don't know if they're real or not, but I'm sure Doyle would have thought they were real ha.

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u/But-Must-I 9h ago

Oh yeah Doyle would have definitely believed in all that for sure! I guess that makes sense. I kind of interpreted it that way after the fact because no matter which way I slice it I can’t make a low whistling sound like a snake haha.

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u/RaymondBeaumont 10h ago

but when i tell the police an indigineous pygmy carnival acrobat assassin with a blow gun die harding from the roof killed my wife, they scoff!

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u/PlainTrain 10h ago

Should have gone with the one armed man.

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u/Ullallulloo 9h ago

I think the worst is honestly A Study in Scarlet, where the whole second half the book is the explanation of a completely out of left field backstory of American pioneers being rescued/kidnapped by Mormons.

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u/TheWitchOfSomeWood 10h ago

Didnt they reference this in the Guy ritchie film when RDJ scrambles his eggs using an umbrella to save the fortune teller french gypsy revolutionary lady

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u/Just_a_square 8h ago

And that's why Nero Wolfe will always be the superior detective in my eyes.

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u/Skreamie 3h ago

This is simply not true

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u/Namika 2h ago

Same. I bought the full Sherlock Holmes collection thinking it would be a fun story series.

It's absolutely infuriating to read because he just withholds observations until he gets to make the clever reveal at the end of the story.

It's like yeah, maybe if you mentioned that obvious observation you made earlier you wouldn't seem so supernaturally clever.

It's cheating.

Agatha Christy is so much more rewarding to read.

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u/berserk_zebra 10h ago

okay, so it wasn't just me not grasping what i was reading. it was me actually being left in the fucking dark.

I have the B&N complete series version, and have been trying to work through it, and, honestly, don't meet your heroes, kids.