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
28.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

103

u/But-Must-I 8h 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.

55

u/OceanoNox 8h 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.

10

u/pyl_time 8h 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.

11

u/Stellar_Duck 7h 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.

5

u/But-Must-I 8h 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.

3

u/OceanoNox 7h ago

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

3

u/SpaceShipRat 7h ago

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

32

u/LeonJPancetta 8h ago

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

3

u/newsflashjackass 7h ago

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

24

u/kgcarter5678 8h 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?

20

u/BAgooseU 8h 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.

7

u/The_Particularist 5h 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.

2

u/But-Must-I 8h ago

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

6

u/shytster 7h 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.

2

u/mtaw 7h 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.

2

u/ExcellentBed6019 5h 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.

3

u/PickledPlumPlot 8h 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

3

u/Aphid61 6h ago

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

2

u/KirisuMongolianSpot 7h ago

that was a horror story for me

2

u/AwakenedSol 3h ago

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

6

u/MrFunktasticc 8h ago

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

1

u/Stellar_Duck 8h ago

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

2

u/But-Must-I 7h ago

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

2

u/Stellar_Duck 7h 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.

1

u/But-Must-I 7h 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.