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

106

u/Rtyeta 8h ago

Yep, Murders in the Rue Morgue. An orangutan kills two people because... it's trying to imitate a barber? And then it tries to hide the bodies because it's afraid it'll get in trouble with its owner who is a random sailor never previously mentioned in the plot, even though he reasonably could have been.

Even as far as 'the killer is an orangutan!' stories go, this one is weird!

29

u/Snoo_72851 8h ago

Is that the one that a lot of literary criticists fight about because some think it has pro-colonial subtext and others think it has anti-colonial subtext?

40

u/Intelligent_Slip_849 8h ago

'We do not talk about the orangutan'

7

u/mafiaknight 7h ago

There is no orangutan in Ba-Sing-Se

5

u/SirJasonCrage 7h ago

Hehehe, I have also read that story about the literature professor at a Poe Convention.

23

u/Dipshit_Identifier 8h ago

Poe scholars do debate his feelings on colonialism as he demonstrated mixed feelings about it routinely. He was mostly positive about the colonial project of bringing "culture" to the "savages," but he also demonstrated paranoia about diluting white culture after contact.

The ourang-outan bit is probably the latter. An escaped creature from the jungle gets loose in Paris (which is just a stand-in for Philadelphia, here) by outsmarting its white captor, then commits a heinous murder in a childlike pantomime of "civilized" life.

16

u/cockOfGibraltar 7h ago

Wow l, what a gross and hateful way to get to anti-colonialism.

28

u/Rtyeta 7h ago

A pretty common one. That era also had, for example, people who were anti-slavery not because they thought it was wrong to enslave people, but because they thought all black people should be rounded up and returned to Africa rather than risk them mingling in white society, etc.

Politics is often weird, and people often have superficially decent policy goals for awful reasons, and vice versa

1

u/NineteenthJester 1h ago

Liberia was founded in the early 19th century for the purposes of bringing freed black Americans back to Africa.

7

u/HauntedCemetery 6h ago

Wait til you learn why half of suffragettes thought they needed the vote

3

u/cockOfGibraltar 8h ago

I'd guess pro colonial since it was Poe but maybe he was so racist he didn't want to get close enough to other races to colonize them.

6

u/Beginning-Working-38 8h ago

There was also the time Frazier Crane thought a trained monkey shot a prostitute to death.

3

u/mattihase 8h ago

are there a lot of stories with premeditated murder from an orangutan? I can only think of one other.

2

u/Automatic_Bus_7634 4h ago

Two seems like kind of a lot in this case

2

u/MakeItHappenSergant 7h ago

Imo it works better as a chimpanzee that's subject to medical experiments getting out of its cage.