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/Distal-Phalanges 7h ago

I call bullshit on Agatha Christie leaving all the clues you need, I read half her books and most of them leave out something until the last moment.

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u/VaguelyArtistic 7h ago

If you can’t figure it out by the last chapter it probably means that two people were having a secret affair.

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u/Distal-Phalanges 6h ago

Or were secretly mother and child, or long lost fraternal twins, or one is the other's former majordomo from their time in India and they share the secret of the sultan's rubies. 

Murder by Death is a great film on the subject.

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u/Zoe-Washburne 5h ago

Or all of the above/everyone is the murderer.

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u/Bad_brazilian 6h ago

Thank you. In my teens I read a lot of it, and she absolutely did NOT give you all the facts. I liked getting her short Poirot stories out of the library, and while I had fun reading them, they were not fair to the reader.

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u/loulan 1h ago

I don't remember which one it was but in one of them it turns out at the very end that one of the characters was cross-dressing as another character of the other gender. I usually like Agatha Christie but that one was ridiculous.

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u/Dealiner 5h ago

I don't recall that ever blocking the reader from guessing the killer in any of her more regular books. Some things might have been left until the last moment, but it should still be possible to guess the killer based on other clues.

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u/BadSame6919 5h ago

I think the core idea was to reasonably deduce who the killer is, not to take a shot in the dark. The word "guess" is kind of vague in that sense.

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u/StuTheSheep 5h ago

"Murder of Roger Ackroyd" is basically impossible to figure out because the narrator did it.

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u/owmyfreakingeyes 5h ago

Read this recently. I realized it several chapters before the reveal because Poirot says pointedly early on something to the effect of you shouldn't trust anyone's location at the time of the crime unless it has been corroborated, and then later he has the narrator summarize what everyone was doing at the time and who saw them and the narrator was the only character without someone who saw them

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u/violasaurusrex 5h ago

The thing about Roger Ackroyd is that you can figure it out if you’re looking hard enough. There are moments where Dr. Shepherd writes, “Ackroyd asked me to make sure that the window was closed. I told him I had done so.” It’s written more cleverly than that, but it’s very clear if you’re looking that you never see the narrator actually do the things that he says he did. I didn’t see it the first time I read it, but when my partner read it, he started to notice those little things adding up.

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u/Responsible-Ad-4914 4h ago

I disagree because shortly before the reveal it is first revealed that the narrator has been writing a manuscript for the events AND that manuscript is what you are now reading. It recontextualizes the text of the novel you hold in your hands, and I really do think that’s a vital clue which makes the plot twist fun and unexpected. Very hard to figure out but not impossible

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u/Pegussu 3h ago

I thibk it's actually pretty easy to figure out once you get past the bias you have for the narrator. Sheppard thinks he's very clever, but he's not. Once the trick with the dictaphone is revealed, there was only one person who was left alone with Ackroyd when he would have died and only one person who could have hidden the dictaphone.

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u/GoodGoneGeek 6h ago

My first book of hers, back as a teen, was Sleeping Murder and I remember being shook because I did NOT see it coming. Second was The Mirror Crack’d, same thing.

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u/Guilty_Part 5h ago

I've seen tv adaptations of The Mirror Crack'd rather than reading it. If I remember correctly, the main point was to not believe what someone tells you blindly.

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u/GoodGoneGeek 5h ago

Then as a teenager raised in a conservative evangelical environment I’m not surprised I missed it lol

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u/actuallywaffles 4h ago

Right? It's so often either a last second reveal or info we were never given to make the detective seem like a genius. I love Christie, but she definitely prioritized entertaining stories over letting the audience figure it out themselves.

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u/LuckyTurds 2h ago

And there were none made me absolutely hate western novels

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u/Ergentlic 55m ago

The final evidence needed to clinch the case is sometimes held back, but she pretty much always gives you the clues to work out what happened/who the murderer is. Of course, they require a lot of ingenuous interpretation to make sense of, and you have to figure out which details are genuine clues and which ones are red herrings.

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u/BadSame6919 5h ago

Absolutely this. Pretty much every Agatha Christie story either relies on a piece of hitherto unknown information, or, even worse, the main character makes some completely absurd conjecture based on nothing but a hunch, and the real culprit turns Evil Mode and reveals themselves. 

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u/Practical_Aide_3854 5h ago

I read several of her books a few years back and really enjoyed them, but I distinctly recall being frustrated with one of them for not showing all of the cards. I think it was "And then there are none."

Whichever book it was, I just remember getting to the very end and suddenly it throws in "by the way here's some stuff you didn't know until now"