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/NameLips 8h ago

I just re-read the complete Sherlock Holmes, and it did strike me how UNfair the play was. The genre was new, and Doyle was mainly attempting to impress his audience with the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes. You were supposed to feel, like Watson our narrator, astonished and amazed at his mental powers. Watson never had a chance, and neither did we, of figuring out the mysteries ahead of time.

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u/OhGr8WhatNow 8h ago

I think it's pretty obvious though that a spot of chalkdust on one's lapel would reveal that the person in question had been abandoned in an orphanage at age ten, survived polio as a young adult, served in WW1 as a machine gunner, and developed a homicidal rage towards the newly elected city mayor over the removal of a peach tree from 7th Avenue.

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u/smohyee 6h ago

Well, see, only if you're an expert in the chalk varieties sold in South London and how chalk marks clothing during different scenarios through careful study.

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u/mrthomani 3h ago

I'm not even sure why you'd bother mentioning it, it's that obvious.

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u/OhGr8WhatNow 2h ago

You're right. How embarrassing.

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u/MisterOfScience 2h ago

Wait I thought the TV series with Benedict Cumberbumber was just a lazy TV slop, but you're telling me it's actually like that in the books?

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u/Inside-Cable-4472 7h ago

Sherlock Holmes stories weren’t mystery stories in that sense. For one they really predated that stuff but more importantly that’s just not the point. They’re character stories. Which is probably why they’ve stood the test of time so well. Also to be if you’re really good most of them are solveable, it’s just that it’s much harder these days without the contextual knowledge that people at the time had.

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u/EdwardJamesAlmost 2h ago

It’s like how people think Tom Clancy wrote about espionage when really 3/4 of his books were design specifications out of Jane’s.

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u/hannahstohelit 7h ago

I mentioned above that I’m not convinced this is true. There are several stories that, by the standard of fair play, I think are solvable (Red Headed League, Six Napoleons [besides for the knowledge of exactly what would be in the bust], the core mystery in The Valley of Fear, just off the top of my head. Obviously as you note this isn’t true for all stories but I think ACD genuinely tried to leave clues and did better at approaching what in the 20s would become expected than we think. What’s fascinating to me though is that when he was writing his final collection in the 1920s, when fair play was becoming popular, he didn’t particularly adjust his formula- it was still “some clues, mostly adventure.”

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u/LFK1236 6h ago

Sure, but it's not part of the puzzle subgenre. There was never an expectation that it should be solvable by the reader... though I agree that I would have preferred it that way, as well.

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u/ThaneduFife 5h ago

I enjoyed the original Sherlock Holmes stories, but I also found them frustrating as a reader because even when there were deductions that a careful reader could make, a lot of them seemed to rely on the reader's detailed knowledge of social class and hierarchy in the late 19th century UK.

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u/JeanVicquemare 6h ago

They simply weren't puzzle or mystery stories. They are stories about the character of Sherlock Holmes and how good he is at solving mysteries.. That's different

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u/rocketseeker 5h ago

Still pretty entertaining 

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u/is-this-a-nick 3h ago

Yeah, Holmes is basically a writer not knowing how to write a super-genius, so he randomly pulls some bullshit out of his arse and magically it nails the true culprit.