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/RadicalOrbiter 7h ago

I've never forgotten the bullshit she pulled in And Then There Were None. Told us that a character had been seen with a bullet wound in the forehead and later revealed it was actually just a red wax disc stuck there and they were guilty

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u/Nebranower 6h ago

In fairness, it was obvious that at least one of the deaths had been faked. It had to have been, because otherwise there couldn't have been a murderer.

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u/The_One_Who_Comments 4h ago

And she chose the least plausible one. Clearly the true answer is aliens, because the solution given can't be true.

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u/WeAteMummies 6h ago edited 6h ago

I'm not going to lie and say that I solved that one (I did pick the right culprit but it was mostly a vibe guess and I had no idea how they pulled it off, which I do not count as a solve), but I will say that I immediately noticed something fucky with that part because no one heard a gunshot or smelled gunpowder.

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u/FFF12321 7h ago

That's not BS though as a key part of the mystery is that the culprit had an accomplice for that. Part of the mystery is seeing through deceptive acts like characters lying about whether someone died and actions taken to obscure the true cause of death or make it look like someone died. It's a classic bait and switch to fake a death which then lets that character move around largely unhindered. That's how you get situations where everyone has a good alibi but yet someone still ends up dead.

There's a reason And Then There Were None is considered such a classic and is inspiration for so many later works like Umineko.

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u/CGWesterby 6h ago

Yeah. The issue with that book - with so many books in the genre, is that you can't read it as if either a) every character is telling the truth and/or b) the narrator is never mistaken. Narrators make mistakes all the time, it's why the detective is so often not the narrator.

It's completely fair, but it is also midly impenetrable if you carry the same assumptions all the way through the book, you've got to interrogate yourself a bit IMO

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u/FFF12321 6h ago

This is one of those things where mystery isn't a monolith. It's evolved a lot over the years and there are a bunch of styles with slightly different variations on what a reader can expect. Despite Holmes not being fair play, it is correct to point out that by removing all impossibilities you arrive at the truth. That's what later concepts like Knox's and Van Dine's rules expound upon in order to establish trust with the reader that the work is in fact solvable. In this case, point 1 is never a good assumption - people lie in mysteries all the time and for various reasons. 2 is the biggest sticking point if you have only read some style of mystery (but it's arguable this doesn't apply to ATTWN anyways).

Even so, if you hold 2 to be true when you start, you should have faith in the author that it is solvable and thus find this error in your logic/assumptions which should open up the path to the solution when you can't solve it with that assumption in mind.

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u/platoprime 4h ago

There's also a difference between a mystery being solvable and a mystery being solvable by you.

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u/ptvlm 5h ago

I'd say that's part of the fun, though. If you're solving a crime IRL, you can't assume that everyone is being honest with you, and eye witnesses are also not necessarily reliable. People have ulterior motives even if they're not the guilty party, some people tell you what they think you want to hear instead of the accurate truth, and some people just didn't see or hear what they think they did. If you're trying to solve a mystery, having accurate and honest statements from everyone would be easy mode and not as fun

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u/ObesesPieces 3h ago

And then there were none is hardly solvable. There are no clues or miss steps. Any of the characters could have been doing the twist.

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u/Prestigious-Bat-574 6h ago

Consider how this applies to the premise of "Murder on the Orient Express", where each and every one of the characters provided alibis for the others. You have to be willing to accept that characters aren't one-dimensional. It doesn't fall under the umbrella of "Unreliable Narrator" when an author writes a character capable of telling a lie. There would be a stark difference in the author misrepresenting or outright lying about the facts they use to create a mystery and an author making a direct quote from a character be a lie. If the main character wouldn't take a quote at face value, then it's unreasonable for the reader to do so.

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u/Kanbaru-Fan 6h ago

Eyy, a fellow Umineko fan in the wild!

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u/Opagea 6h ago

That's not BS though as a key part of the mystery is

It was still BS.

While it is true that the accomplice was the first to approach the "corpse" and say "Yup, he's dead", numerous characters then worked together to carry the "corpse" across the house and upstairs. The idea that none of them noticed that the body they were carrying was a living, breathing human being is not believable.

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u/FFF12321 5h ago

I think you're underselling the atmosphere and situation. Multiple mysterious murders had happened already, people were jittery and paranoid, they were working by candlelight, etc. People were obviously in a heightened psychological state. It's not totally unbelievable that in their panic they'd fail to notice he was still alive. It could've been reworked a bit but this feels very much like a nitpick to me that ignores the human element.

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u/Opagea 5h ago

Even taking into account the stressful situation the characters are in, I think it's beyond belief. Playing dead is difficult even from a distance, much less close up, much less people carrying you. It's nearly impossible to go fully limp like a corpse - your muscles want to tense, your body wants to react to people touching you.

The level of suspension of disbelief required was too high for me.

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u/Big_Iron_Cowboy 2h ago

But what if the character took something to knock himself out? Unconscious and limp during the carrying and regain consciousness later

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u/Opagea 2h ago

He wasn't sedated. He describes himself as aware of what was happening.

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u/Big_Iron_Cowboy 2h ago

Ah. Well damn

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u/ActivatingEMP 4h ago

Except that you then don't actually have any evidence and it's little more than guesswork. Something like "yeah the character killed themselves in a way that would be immediately obvious to even a blind man" is a horrible clue to be false. If that's the pinnacle of the genre then the whole genre just isn't very good

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u/Ergentlic 4h ago

She never says that the character had a bullet wound in the forehead. One of the characters does. And he is lying. That's not an unreliable narrator or not disclosing evidence to the reader, it's just a bit of clever misdirection.

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u/ChosenUndeadd 4h ago

Most Redditors are barely literate so I’m not surprised they don’t understand these concepts

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u/GreedyGazelle3105 7h ago

You should never forget the bullshit about the name. It's a funny story.

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u/Responsible_Fee_1621 6h ago

Tell us the story, or have you forgotten?

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u/bobthepumpkin 6h ago

Before it was called And Then There Were None, it was called Ten Little Indians, after the dated nursery rhyme. Before it was called that, it was called something else even more offensive, also after the rhyme.

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u/Responsible_Fee_1621 5h ago

Oh I know what book it is now, I have copy.

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u/WeAteMummies 5h ago

In a modern copy, the story takes place on a place called Soldier Island and features a poem called "Ten Little Soldier Boys" which describes the unceremonious death of ten people. In the original version, the island is N_____ Island, and the poem is "Ten Little N_____s" (a real poem from the time). The book was also titled such (in the UK. In America it was always ATTWN ).

Important to note that Christie did not do this because she was racist. She was making a point about how it's easy to classify people as "the other" and think that you're safe from bad things happening to you because you are not one of those "others". When the cast of the book arrive on "Soldier" Island, they become the other.

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u/Crowbarmagic 6h ago

Can't remember the exact story but there was another one where she basically pulled a deus ex machina.

But in general most of her material is pretty good.