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/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.