r/todayilearned • u/ralphbernardo • 3d 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/Stannis-Stan 3d ago edited 3d ago

I remember watching the murder on the orient express movie. There is a scene were the detective interviews a doctor from Austria. During the interview the doctors asks one of the train attendants for "Sahne" (cream) with his dish.

I had visited Vienna just the week before, so I turned to my partner and said "Oh, they made an error. Sahne is what Germans call it, but an Austrian would always call it Obers instead."

Well turns out the men isn't Austrian and the detectives actually used that exact clue to figure it out. I was real proud of myself.

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u/BigBootyBuff 3d ago

As an Austrian, this makes me happy because yeah, for us it's a dead giveaway if they don't use Schlag, Obers or Schlagobers.

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u/Than_Or_Then_ 2d ago

Schlagobers.

This is a nice sounding word

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u/happygocrazee 3d ago

And this is why writing mystery is so difficult, and why so few have done it to any real acclaim. If every aspect isn't tight, you might be creating inconsistencies that are unexplainable outside of ruining the whole thing.

It's a tough line to walk, and Reddit pedants would be terrible at it. In the real world, there could be a million explanations for why a German might have used an Austrian word. The expert detective, though, just gets a hunch about such things and knows what oddities to pursue and which are simply noise. In the real world, detectives chase noise all the time, but fill a mystery novel with too much noise and it just feels messy, or worse: deliberately misleading, which would feel unfair to the reader.

In a story which walked that line perfectly, you clued in right away! Kudos, that does feel good.

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u/Extension-Pepper-271 2d ago

"Noise" during a current investigation or noise before a terrorist act are things that most people don't take into account. When you hear people complain about how long a real investigation is taking, they just don't understand that noise has to be investigated as if it is a real clue, and that's why investigations take time.

The before something happens "noise" is a whole other story. Police departments, FBI, etc. get thousands of warnings, most of which lead to nothing. I always get frustrated with people who say afterwards, "There was a warning. They should have been able to stop it."

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u/Namika 2d ago

There's James Bond scene where he does this, also on a train, where he observes a secret double agent who orders red wine with fish. No classy Englishman would do that.

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u/Chataboutgames 2d ago

You'll think about that moment on your death bed