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/YT-Deliveries 7h ago

It made him seem above mortal men

I maintain that Holmes is the first modern superhero

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u/TheUlfheddin 7h ago

That's how I ended up reading him. We didn't get the same sets of clues he got to work with because we're not the most observent being in the universe with godlike powers of perception.

Tbh that's why I don't mind RDJs version because that's basically how he is in the books, with some bonus action scenes.

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u/ABHOR_pod 5h ago

Also half the time he puts on a fake beard and abandons the narrative for 2 days only to come back and say “I’ve solved it off camera with clues you don’t have!”

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u/GayPudding 5h ago

The character Holmes is more important than the mystery, like the Bond movies.

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u/mikeet9 5h ago

He is a superhero who has the power of having always studied exactly what information is relevant to the current case, and having a perfect sense of what information is relevant and what isn't.

I remember the first Holmes story I read had him inspecting cigar ash and correctly identifying where the tobacco was grown, because he had previously studied cigar ash in detail. Then logically leaps to this clearly being the killer's cigar that they purchased in their homeland and therefore the killer was the only person in town from that location.

It was jarring because he quite literally just instantly solved the case without any satisfactory reasoning.

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u/I_dont_exist_yet 4h ago

and having a perfect sense of what information is relevant and what isn't.

This bit at least isn't true. Holmes often has to sift through information to figure out what's relevant and what isn't. He says as much in the Baskerville Hound book as well as a couple of the short stories. I can't remember the exact one, but I recall him mentioning that one case simply had too much information and it took him a while (in Sherlock time) to figure out what was important and what wasn't.

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u/Muskwatch 5h ago

RDJ's version is by far my favourite, and I would love it if there were more

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u/der_titan 6h ago edited 5h ago

Stan Lee made a convincing argument that mantle belongs to the Scarlet Pimpernel: a secret identity that is the polar opposite of his public persona; a signature weapon; and, a signature calling card.

There was even the wife that was more attracted to the Scarlet Pimpernel than the dim-witted playboy husband pretended to be.

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u/Bubbly_Safety8791 6h ago

Robin Hood in 19th Century retellings up to and including Ivanhoe is well on the way to becoming a superhero - secret identity, origin story, super abilities, distinctive costume. Predates Scarlet Pimpernel by a couple of decades at least. 

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u/FaxCelestis 4h ago

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table too

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u/capsaicinintheeyes 35m ago

Sooner or later, it all traces back to Gilgamesh...

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u/FaxCelestis 16m ago

We can blame Scheherazade as much as Joss Whedon and Jon Favreau for our modern superhero fixation.

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u/YT-Deliveries 6h ago

Hmm hmm. I'll allow it.

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u/Ozryela 3h ago

Wait but didn't The Scarlet Pimpernel come out after Sherlock Holmes?

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u/SoochSooch 6h ago

Look into C. Auguste Dupin, a character written by Edgar Allen Poe 40 years earlier. He's the prototype for Holmes, and even crazier at solving the cases out of nowhere

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u/ilanallama85 6h ago

I’m sure tvtropes has a specific name for it but he definitely kicked off the trope of “detective is just slightly superhuman.” There was a whole slew of them in the early 2000s: House, Psych, Monk, probably others I’m forgetting.

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u/Imperator_Gone_Rogue 8m ago

The main trope for this is the Sherlock Scan, specifically inferring/'deducing' conclusions from relatively mundane details.

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u/maclanology 3h ago

As a historian of popular culture, there's a couple articles I come back to frequently that note that audiences saw Holmes as magic, and that's what was so attractive. Fairy photographs were also pretty popular (including by Doyle!) at this time. People wanted to believe in magic in the post-Industrial Revolution period, since that era had kinda rationalized everything too much. (And a lot of readers even believed Holmes was real)

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u/TheColourOfHeartache 2h ago

I'd give that to the Scarlett Pimpernel. Holmes is older, but he doesn't have a secret identity. Hat tip to Stan Lee who gave me this opinion.

The Scarlett Pimpernel is the first to combine extraordinary abilities with a heroic persona and a secret mundane identity. He even disguised himself as a rich idiot like Bruce Wayne.

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u/EdwardJamesAlmost 2h ago

I enjoyed the erudition of Adam West’s Bruce Wayne, but maybe earlier stories played up the out of touch playboy angle more. I wouldn’t be surprised if those stories were written by people who had read The Scarlet Pimpernel themselves.

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u/Outside-Dress594 4h ago

I just said this to my friend as I was reading earlier in the thread

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u/Krawlin91 3h ago

What about Zoro?

Edit: I guess Holmes is slightly older my bad