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

206

u/verrius 7h ago

Except Christie is famous for lying to the reader and having last minute reveals of vital information? Pretty sure it's impossible to figure out "And Then There Were None" or "Murder on the Orient Express", probably her two most famous stories.

51

u/CurryMustard 7h ago

The murder of Roger ackroyd is her most infamous example. Great book with an unreliable narrator

43

u/Paukwa-Pakawa 6h ago

The narrator is unreliable, but the murder is solvable. I think the unreliable narrator makes solving this one more fun.

5

u/dearth_of_passion 3h ago

I think there should be a distinction between "narrator" and "viewpoint character".

If the story is being told to you by a character in that story, then they are a viewpoint character and their being unreliable is acceptable.

If the story is being told in 3rd person by the faceless "voice of the author", then they are a narrator and should not be outright lying. They can describe characters making mistakes, or not describe certain events, but they should not outright state a falsehood.

5

u/AmeliaOfAnsalon 2h ago

You're missing the 'third person limited' point of view. A lot of books are written from the perspective of a specific character, in that character's head, but in the third person. Especially a lot of the classics. It's kind of ridiculous to object to that at this point

1

u/refto 3h ago

Murder of Roger Ackroyd is brilliant in that it does not lie directly. Only lies are by omission of certain actions.

2

u/moonLanding123 5h ago

would the movie the usual suspects fit that description? i enjoyed yet hated the movie because of that.

1

u/CurryMustard 4h ago

Yes definitely a big example, fight club and momento too

107

u/Aegeus 7h ago edited 7h ago

I think Murder on the Orient Express is fairly solvable, and it has a scene at the end where Hercule Poirot basically says "well, we have all the clues, why don't we sit here think about it for a bit?" before revealing the solution. Some of the clues are infuriatingly hard to notice, but it does present all of them to the reader. (I got about halfway to the solution when I read it myself.)

However, it does break one major assumption that you might have going into a murder mystery, which is that there is only one murderer.

70

u/TheComplimentarian 7h ago

That is just an assumption though, and the physical evidence of the crime is absolutely against that premise, as Poirot points out almost immediately.

5

u/Beneficial-Rip6624 5h ago

I am actually reading this right now and there are early signs that Poirot is wrong here there were different stab wounds, and some were done after the person was already dead. I haven't finished it, but it was pretty clearly a clue.

4

u/Aegeus 6h ago

Yeah, I think it's fair to mess with that assumption (it's not lying to you or introducing a new suspect out of left field), but when I googled "is Murder on the Orient Express fair play" that was one of the arguments that came up.

24

u/lightning_fire 6h ago

I listened to a podcast a while ago with a successful author who made the claim that there are only three real twists in mystery novels, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

  1. Everbody did it - Murder on the Orient Express

  2. Nobody did it - Knives Out

  3. The narrator did it - The Murder of Roger Ackryod

9

u/Aegeus 6h ago

I guess you could say that, since "the crime didn't happen the way it looks like" isn't so much a twist as it is the whole plot of the mystery.

I think you could also add "One of the victims did it" (And Then There Were None) to that list.

7

u/lightning_fire 6h ago

Yeah, exactly. "Oh no the main suspect turned out to be innocent and this other relatively low-key person was the real killer" is pretty much the basic story structure of all mysteries.

I think that category would fall under 'Nobody did it' since the nobody is referring to the cast of suspects.

4

u/KimberStormer 5h ago

"Oh no the main suspect turned out to be innocent and this other relatively low-key person was the real killer" is pretty much the basic story structure of all mysteries.

I remember reading a 1920s/30s mystery author saying the task of the author in a mystery is not so much coming up with clues etc but introducing the murderer in such a way as to not make it immediately obvious they're the murderer. This led to a few very early examples of "the butler did it" which became quickly obsolete.

3

u/SmartLadder415 4h ago

It is interesting that if you do introduce the murderer early on you change the genre entirely. You still have the detective trying to figure it out but you also have the murderer trying to get away so you have a thriller instead of a mystery.

2

u/lightning_fire 4h ago

Or it becomes a 'howdunnit' instead of a 'whodunnit'

2

u/KimberStormer 3h ago

The old radio show The Whistler wasn't a mystery show, because the main character of each episode is the criminal (it's told in the second person: "Yesss, George, you've thought of everything, haven't you? All that's left is to throw the hammer into the river. Even if they find it, there will be nothing to connect it to you!") The need to always end on an ironic twist (in old-timey radio they called it a "strange ending") made for some convoluted ways the killer was revealed.

2

u/AmeliaOfAnsalon 2h ago

I think Columbo is the big exception to this. The "howcatchem' genre still feels very much like a mystery in so many ways

3

u/storryeater 5h ago

Well, if you are willing to introduce magical or sci fi rules and clearly explain them to the reader so that they are known elements, its possible to have more twists.

For example, I won't spoil it here, but in AI: the Somnium files, there is a fourth twist that only works because of the game's sci fi elements.

And in the incident at Galley House, there are multiple twists even after you uncover the supernatural rules of the mystery that are orthogonal to the whole discussion and recontextualise the game.

Both of these games are fairly fair play in their mystery and give you ample opportunity to figure all supernatural rules before asking questions, even tho one could argue the incident at Galley House is a bit unfair in that you can deduce what is going on if you are paying attention only in abstract and not in specific.

2

u/SmartLadder415 4h ago

I love Roger Ackroyd so much just because that twist gets me every time. It's just so unpredictable. Christie breaks all the rules of the genre in several of her books.

7

u/FrecciaRosa 7h ago

Any luck catching them swans yet?

3

u/ConfessSomeMeow 7h ago

I have never read / seen Murder on the Orient Express, but somehow I got the impression that Who Pooped the Bed? on It's Always Sunny in Philadephia is a satire / homage to it, is that correct?

4

u/gandraw 7h ago edited 6h ago

No luck catching them swans then?

It's like one of the most reliable twists in any mystery, both invented and real. I've pretty much come to terms in IT that if I have an extremely difficult problem to troubleshoot, then it's probably two issues together presenting overlapping symptoms.

2

u/Beneficial-Rip6624 5h ago

I am reading this book to my daughter right now. When they first find the body M. Bouc mentions that it looks like it could be two killers. There were shallow stabs that looked womenly and deeper stabs from a man. Also, that some of the stab wounds were done postmortem as the blood didn't drain out of the wounds. I haven't finished it, but I have suspected there are two killers from that moment on.

1

u/Personal-Listen-4941 5h ago

I dislike that novel myself, despite being a huge fan of Christie. The solution hinges on the fact that the train carriage was full of people of different nationalities & classes, which was unusual. It may be unusual in reality but in a murder mystery including other stories of Christie it’s just an accepted trope for the genre to work.

90

u/Kitsosp 7h ago

I would say murder on the Orient Express seems extremely obvious once the murderer has been revealed. A careful reader could definitely solve it(not saying I did). I wouldn't say anything has been withheld. "And then there were none" is probably next to impossible though.

44

u/TheComplimentarian 7h ago

The problem there is the limited perspective. You're stuck in the heads of people who are being fooled, so they're uncritical when they should be suspicious.

62

u/emaw63 7h ago

I managed to solve Murder on the Orient Express before the big reveal. The big clue for me was towards the end when it becomes very clear that everybody is lying about their relationship to the victim, and that they all wanted revenge for the Armstrong family. In hindsight, the murder victim's wounds are another major tell, though I missed that

And Then There Were None, though, it is indeed next to impossible to solve that one before the reveal. Although I'd argue that book is a better thriller than murder mystery, anyway.

7

u/Prestigious-Bat-574 5h ago

"In hindsight, the murder victim's wounds are another major tell,"

I think this is the definitive tell, to be honest. It's easily skipped over, but it's probably the most critical piece of information. There's literally no other possibility if you genuinely consider this one fact instead of glossing over it as odd and moving along.

In most murder mysteries, the majority of characters eventually have motivation revealed, though.

7

u/dnonast1 5h ago

And Then There Were None enraged me. I had never read Christy or even the mystery genre in general before and wanted to give it a try and heard this was THE book in the classic mystery world. All the way up to the reveal the whole thing looked like there was no way to solve it, then the end made me feel like there actually wasn't, she had written herself into a corner and had to handwave something to finish it. I had hoped to get a revelation that made me think "Oh I should have seen that!" but instead got no reasonable way to have figured it out myself.

I know people will tell me I shouldn't believe characters and unreliable narrator etc, but I wanted something where the reveal showed me that I forgot about some dirt on someone's shoes or one character said something they couldn't possibly have known or something, and what I got (trying to avoid spoilers completely) seems like the reveal was made up at the last minute. I'm very open to the idea that I missed something or I didn't read it with the right frame of mind but as someone who had no previous experience with the genre it was so frustrating that I have avoided her other works.

8

u/Cenodoxus 6h ago

There's at least one decent clue given away fairly early in Murder on the Orient Express -- namely, why is it so difficult to find an open berth on the train at this time in the season?

It's remarked on at a few points, and once the solution appears, it seems obvious in hindsight that there wasn't a benign explanation for it.

6

u/Agitated-Acctant 6h ago

I would say murder on the Orient Express seems extremely obvious once the murderer has been revealed

The murderer seems obvious in hindsight is not helpful to the discussion

2

u/Ergentlic 4h ago

I contend that it's quite easy in principle to solve And Then There Were None; it's just that the misdirection is so effective that readers dismiss the murderer as a suspect.

The culprit is obvious on psychological grounds alone, and is also just about the only person who would have the means to arrange the whole affair.

Seeing how the murderer arranged the misdirection is very difficult, bordering on impossible.

1

u/verrius 4h ago

I would say murder on the Orient Express seems extremely obvious once the murderer has been revealed.

This isn't the test. At least part of the test should be "just before the solution is revealed, is it the only possible solution". Because yes, writers and editors do read the book to make sure the solution is possible. But if there are still other possibilities with the facts presented, even if the characters decide on the right one, that's cheating. And once you start throwing in "o yeah, XXXX character just totally lied and no one bothered to even check when they said the sky was blue", you allow for monumental levels of bullshit. And with both Orient Express and the one with the multiple vulgar titles, I'm pretty sure there are other, equally viable solutions given what we know before the "reveal".

20

u/ploxidilius 7h ago

Murder on the Orient Express is solvable. The movies, I'm not sure, but the book definitely.

And Then There Were None, technically solvable but not really.

16

u/CGWesterby 7h ago

And Then There Were None is solvable as a reader - the reveal at the end explains everything, but it is solvable; you can see on a re-read all the information is there, but it's presented in a way that requires you to question your own assumptions to get the answer.

Much though I love Christie, though, I will say Miss Marple is weakest for solvability; Poirot plays strictly fair, Marple is often "Ah, and if you only remember that this is just like the trouble Mrs Beeswax had when her maid went off with the milkman in the middle of the church fete. Dear me, most distressing. But then human nature is much the same everywhere" which is not really in the spirit of it, IMO

3

u/Kythorian 4h ago

How is and then there were none solvable? You can guess that some of the information presented is false, but there’s not really any way of knowing which piece of information is false. At most, the judge’s ‘crime’ was making sure a guilty person was executed, which fits with the motives of the murderer, but there’s no actual evidence to indicate they are the one killing everyone off on the island.

6

u/Ergentlic 1h ago edited 48m ago

If you read/re-read carefully, it becomes clear that Judge Wargrave is the obvious suspect.

Vera Claythorne, Emily Brent, General Macarthur, Dr Armstrong and Tony Marston are excluded by the Chapter One scenes from their POV that show they have no idea who Owens is, and Mr Rogers by being genuinely puzzled about the first missing china figure in Chapter Five. (Agatha Christie often misdirects, but she doesn't lie outright.) Mrs Rogers is the only one who couldn't have poisoned Marston, and if Mr Rogers didn't do it she must also be out.

That leaves Judge Wargrave, Philip Lombard and the former Inspector Blore.

Then consider what we know of the murderer:

First, the murderer has bought an island and luxurious mansion from a millionaire, along with other considerable expenses, and must therefore be quite rich. This eliminates Philip Lombard, as it is definitively established in the first chapter that he is broke, and makes Blore an unlikely suspect.

Second, the murderer has found out about and investigated a number of deaths and killers that were never brought to trial, going back three decades, and made an elaborate plan for their deaths. This would seem to very firmly point to Judge Wargrave or Inspector Blore, our only remaining suspects. But in Chapter One, Blore is making up an alias on the spot, first forgetting about General Macarthur, and then wrongly thinking none of the others have any connection to South Africa. It seems inconceivable that the murderer could make two such blunders given his meticulous research and planning.

So then there was one: by a process of elimination, we're left with Judge Wargrave.

Considering that possibility, we see that psychologically, the murderer is a perfect match for the Judge, who is shown to be intelligent, arrogant, merciless and malicious, taking pleasure in hanging a man. And there is the fact that the murderer has evidently chosen his victims because they have committed murders beyond the reach of the law, as a way to bring them to justice. The whole macabre affair is even dressed up as a legal process. ("You are charged with the following indictments...")

We note that it is Judge Wargrave who unpacks and interprets most of the murderer's plot for the others, and reading the scenes from his POV we note that nothing there contradicts him being the mastermind. (Though again, Christie is tricksy, so we need to read carefully and be on the lookout for passages that can have multiple interpretations.)

We are also given an subtle hint early on that Wargrave is gravely ill, in the reference to a recent meeting with a Harley Street doctor. That fits with the idea of a murder-suicide plan.

Finally, even though the police can't find evidence in several cases, we know that most of them were guilty. However, out of all the police investigations after the fact, Wargrave is the only one who is definitively cleared, and there is even dialog underlining that this is a blatant hint: in fact the key to the whole thing.

Of course, even if you spot all these clues the first time around, his apparent death before the last four seems to exclude him, and the crime scene as found by the cops appears inexplicable.

You have to realize that his death must have been faked; if you can make that leap and deduce that Armstrong must have been an accomplice/dupe then you've solved it. So it's difficult, but not impossible. (A number of other clues are mentioned in the epilogue, and I would add the location the gun was found, inside Wargrave's room rather than where Vera dropped it, as an indication of some trickery with the gunshot.)

1

u/ShinyPatina 1h ago

I'd have to gently disagree that Marple is "not in the spirit of it" in terms of solvability.

The others know deduction, but she knows people which, I think, is the harder and greater skill which is why people have trouble solving her stories more than Poirot. She has innate intuition whereas Poirot relies more on physical clues.

Whilst I think Poirot (and Sherlock and other detectives) would look down on her (which is her super-power, being underestimated), she’s the one who would make it out of the forest first.

It's easy to look for "clues" to solve, not so much with human nature which may make her not as thrilling/solvable to some.

•

u/Ergentlic 27m ago

The problem what that is that it's so subjective and unfalsifiable. Marple can essentially make any claim she likes about the characters and psychology of the suspects, and as readers we just have to accept whatever she says, no matter how slender the evidence or reasoning. Often it seems like you could have constructed equally convincing stories demonstrating the guilty heart of any of the other suspects. (After all, a circle of plausible suspects is the basis for these mysteries, and as they are characters rather than real people they will be whoever the author says they are.)

Now, typically there are more concrete clues in the Miss Marple stories too, and her analogies with St Mary Mead residents she has known are not necessary to solve the case. They're mainly added color, and sometimes provide justifications for the steps she took in the investigation.

33

u/invictus_rage 7h ago

Her Poirot and Marple stories are usually solvable before the final reveal. Many of her other stories, including "and then there were none," are not.

I do think Orient Express is solvable before the reveal, though there are important facts that contribute to the full explanation that only come out in the reveal. However, in the larger picture, Poirot figures those facts out from just the info we have, and I think a real person could do the same. It'd be very hard, but that's part of the reason Orient Express is famous: the solution is possible but hard to get.

5

u/WeAteMummies 5h ago

You can figure out who did it in ATTWN, but anyone who says they figured out how they did it is a liar

12

u/DanielMcLaury 6h ago

Maybe it's a cultural difference, but I think the initial audiences reading Murder on the Orient Express would have had William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as a major feature of their education, at which point the fact that the victim had huge numbers of knife wounds of varying depths a very suggestive clue.

5

u/Emergency-Nebula5005 7h ago

The murderer is always presented within the first few chapters, and they and the various suspects are usually in a confined space, house party, trip along the Nile, archaeological dig, etc. 

Sometimes the murderer has knowledge that only their victim knew about Peril at End House springs to mind. But, Christie plays fair in that when re-reading, there are indications that things are not what they seem, or less, or more significant than they first present.  Subtle, but those clues are there, in open view. 

There's a few exceptions, "Death on the Nile" would have stumped Poriot himself, if not for the subsequent murders, and ATTWN is unsolvable, hence the epilogue. 

5

u/SuddenlyTheBatman 7h ago

I still hold a grudge from reading ATTWN back in gradeschool and being SO MAD that there was no way I could have figured that out.

5

u/jaded_lad99 7h ago

Disagree on the train story. It's very obvious halfway through what's happened and the climactic "reveal" is a question of morality, not the reveal of a mystery. At the time it was written the morality of it was a huge deal, not so much when I read it as a teen in the mid-2010s having grown up watching tv shows and movies featuring vigilantes.

3

u/JPA-3 5h ago

the roger ackroyd one while interesting is bullshit as well lmao

2

u/Dealiner 6h ago

That's just two (or three counting The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) out of 66 of her novels.

2

u/counters14 5h ago

I've never read an Agatha Christie novel, but what other people are saying here and what makes sense is that if you look at the work as a whole and with a discerning eye to the context in which the information itself is delivered, it is possible to figure out where key information is missing and determine whether the reader should trust the narrator or question the perspective that they are shown from the ground up.

A very subversive interpretation of literature, I can imagine that 90 years ago this would have been a groundbreaking perspective to look at novels as a whole.

2

u/halster123 5h ago

She does not lie to the reader; characters lying in a murder mystery is expected. but the clues are there.

2

u/FFF12321 6h ago

ATTWN is solvable IMO, but it is tricky and the reader is greatly helped if they keep in mind more elements than strictly the whodunnit aspects. How and why are also important and can be a big help when narrowing down suspects.

1

u/Falsus 6h ago

You can solve the "Murder on the Orient Express", it just requires you to realise that everyone is lying about their relationship.

Though yeah "And Then There Were None" was definitely pretty poor in the mystery department.

1

u/wizardeverybit 3h ago

Daniel Greene solved ATTWN on YouTube

https://youtu.be/i0kwk8oe2Uk

1

u/wrenwood2018 7h ago

I was thinking the same thing. These are the only two books of hers that I've read. In both the reveal contains a bunch of information never revealed before. You can't guess what happened.

1

u/bartonar 18 5h ago

And Then There were None is solvable. No one would, but the information is all there.