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{{trope}}
[[File:20070725 20070726 A1 CD26MULE~p1.jpg|
{{quote|"''[[Encyclopedia Brown]]? What a hack! To this day, I occasionally reach into my left pocket for my keys with my right hand, just to prove that little brat wrong.''"
This is a specific kind of [[Did Not Do the Research]], where a pivotal clue in solving a mystery or puzzle is actually erroneous. This is related to [[Conviction by Contradiction]], where a single thing wrong with an alibi is sufficient to prove guilt, but goes further: the key that makes the claim or alibi wrong is ''itself'' factually incorrect.
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Many cases can be excused as a result of [[Science Marches On|Science Marching On]]; the "clue" started out as [[Conviction by Contradiction]] (or, rarely, the clue may have been legitimately damning), then science marched it right over here. When this happens but the ultimate conclusion is demonstrated to be correct, it overlaps with [[Right for the Wrong Reasons]], ''especially'' when other clues in the story are skipped over, but are both factual and more useful.
{{examples}}
▲== Anime/Manga ==
* A common one seen in multiple detective series is the unwavering belief that [[Values Dissonance|all women are physically weaker than all men]], which is commonly brought up as a foolproof alibi. Even when there's an elderly, overweight or disabled man in the room who doesn't get the same courtesy. Especially headache-inducing in the Moonlight Sonata case of [[Detective Conan]], where a female nurse is written off as a suspect because she's petite with thin arms and couldn't have lifted the bodies. (Each of which are taller than her and would require quite a feat to move around the way they did.) Then {{spoiler|when it's found out "she" is actually a crossdressing man this alibi immediately vanishes, ''even though he's still the exact same muscleless [[Bishounen]] waif.''}}
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* In the 1980s and 1990s, the Swedish edition of ''[[The Phantom (comic strip)|The Phantom]]'' had a page of reader-submitted material, of which one of the more popular were crime mysteries (see [[Conviction by Contradiction]] for more details). One of these had the culprit give himself away by referring to the banana as a fruit. Even though banana trees are herbaceous plants, a banana is biologically considered a fruit. Even when using the culinary term for fruits (which is probably the term most people outside of the fields of biology, botany, and horticulture are familiar with), this still doesn't exactly excuse the conviction, as the banana is one of the most classic examples of a "Culinary Fruit." (For a more specific description, a culinary fruit is any edible fruit that is sweet. Biologically, a fruit is a plant structure that contains seeds. This is why things like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and cucumbers are classified as fruits by botanists, but not by chefs.)▼
* The trope is [[Invoked]] and [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] in ''[[Welcome to Tranquility]]''. Emoticon is in jail and being questioned with regards to the murder of Mr. Articulate, a crime-solving member of the community who was legendary for his intellect, wit and long and storied history of traveling the world. However, Emoticon points out that a lot of the stories of his adventures were "[[Values Dissonance|culturally insensitive]]", and he recounts one of the detective stories from Mr. Articulate's youth that always stuck in his mind: Mr. Articulate discovered the identity of the murderer because the "Korean" man at dinner left his chopsticks in his bowl of rice, something no actual Korean would do since it is a symbol for death and, therefore, he must not be Korean, but Japanese instead, and thusly the killer. However, Japanese culture has ''the same custom''. "So the ending doesn't ''work''. It's a ''cheat''."▼
** [[Critical Research Failure|Of course, Koreans eat rice with a spoon.]] They eat other dishes with chopsticks.▼
* The British "Adult" comic [[Viz]] ran several parodies of this in the ''Spot The Clue'' strip. A whodunnit situation is shown, with the reader being asked to work out who the perpetrator is. Each time the villain is the one who made an innocuous error, ranging from incorrectly describing the era of a piece of furniture, [[Take That|to claiming to have been sending emails on a piece of hardware that everyone knows is too unreliable to work.]]▼
** Also parodied, along with The Famous Five and The Daily Mail, in the [[Viz]] comic "Jack Black", where a 1940s boy detective with somewhat conservative views would use the most spurious of inconsistencies or counter-factual clues in a person's story to reveal them to be the week's villain (perpetrators of such dastardly deeds as using fake wooden pips to fool people into thinking that "cheap" raspberry jam was "luxury" strawberry jam). Often the villain would be sentenced to death or a comically excessive prison sentence for their "crimes".▼
* In an example similar to [[Encyclopedia Brown]], we have the Belgian comic character Ludo (not related to [[Ludo|that band]]) who was a detective constantly resolving mysteries and crimes by pointing out that the criminal inevitably was the guy with the black socks. It was always about the black socks, even that one time where he pursued a shoplifter in a bathroom to discover that the guy in question was one of ''five identical quintuplets.'' So yeah. [[Space Whale Aesop|Don't wear black socks or else a Belgian detective will pin a murder charge on you.]]▼
==
* In the 1944 ''[[Sherlock Holmes]]'' movie ''[[The Spider Woman]]'', Holmes deduces that a series of apparent suicides were really murders because "suicides invariably leave notes behind them
== [[Literature]] ==
* From ''[[Two Minute Mysteries]]'' by Donald Sobol.
** The "mule" clue was used in "The Case of Molly's Mule."
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** Another solution was based entirely on the supposed 'fact' that roosters ''only crow when they saw light'' (the crime was a con man trying to convince kids he found a way to make roosters crow on command, and he claimed that soon they would find a way to make them lay eggs on command). Now, anybody who has been around a rooster for an extended period of time will know full well that they crow whenever the heck they want, whether the sun is out or not.
*** Also, [[Captain Obvious|Roosters do not lay eggs]].
** One solution in ''Encyclopedia Brown Takes the Cake'' relied on the fact that the culprit had used glycerin tears that fell from the outside corners of her eyes instead of the inside, thus revealing them to be fake, as "If only one tear falls, it will run from the inside corner of the eye, by the nose, and not from the outside corner." Only, none of that is true.
** One story used the same "mules are sterile" [[Common Knowledge]] as the mistake that exposed a [[Con Artist]] pitching a phony gold mine.
* In the''[[Sherlock Holmes]]'' story "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle", Holmes deduces that the owner of a lost hat must be an intellectual, because it is a big hat, and so he has a large head. Again, it's largely [[Science Marches On]]; that was actually a serious scientific theory at the time.
** Hilariously, Holmes, who might be thought to be pretty darned intellectual himself, demonstrated the hat's size by showing it was too big for '''him'''. Which implied, if you accepted the size theory, that the owner was brainier than Sherlock Holmes.
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* In the battle between Archmage Gromph and {{spoiler|Dyrr the lich}} in the ''[[War of the Spider Queen]]'' series, Gromph realizes {{spoiler|Dyrr's}} shapeshift spell means {{spoiler|he's not undead anymore}}, so negative energy spells can and do work on him. The kicker? He'd polymorphed into a construct, which is ''still'' immune to negative energy and {{spoiler|a Lich, unlike most undead, CAN polymorph himself as an explicit part of the runes}}.
* [[Woody Allen]] parodied this in a story called "Match Wits with Inspector Ford", where Inspector Ford deduces that a man didn't kill himself, because there was cash in his pocket, and someone who is about to commit suicide would use a credit card.
** In real life, indications that the victim who committed 'suicide' was planning ahead for the immediate future (
* There was this one story where someone said they saw a thief in their house because they held a spoon up and could see the reflection. This was outed as spoons show reflections upside down. I mean, ''obviously'' you can't tell it's a person from an upside-down image. That'd just be silly
==
▲* In the 1980s and 1990s, the Swedish edition of ''[[The Phantom (comic strip)|The Phantom]]'' had a page of reader-submitted material, of which one of the more popular were crime mysteries (see [[Conviction by Contradiction]] for more details). One of these had the culprit give himself away by referring to the banana as a fruit. Even though banana trees are herbaceous plants, a banana is biologically considered a fruit. Even when using the culinary term for fruits (which is probably the term most people outside of the fields of biology, botany, and horticulture are familiar with), this still doesn't exactly excuse the conviction, as the banana is one of the most classic examples of a "Culinary Fruit." (For a more specific description, a culinary fruit is any edible fruit that is sweet. Biologically, a fruit is a plant structure that contains seeds. This is why things like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and cucumbers are classified as fruits by botanists, but not by chefs.)
▲* The trope is [[Invoked]] and [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] in ''[[Welcome to Tranquility]]''. Emoticon is in jail and being questioned with regards to the murder of Mr. Articulate, a crime-solving member of the community who was legendary for his intellect, wit and long and storied history of traveling the world. However, Emoticon points out that a lot of the stories of his adventures were "[[Values Dissonance|culturally insensitive]]", and he recounts one of the detective stories from Mr. Articulate's youth that always stuck in his mind: Mr. Articulate discovered the identity of the murderer because the "Korean" man at dinner left his chopsticks in his bowl of rice, something no actual Korean would do since it is a symbol for death and, therefore, he must not be Korean, but Japanese instead, and thusly the killer. However, Japanese culture has ''the same custom''. "So the ending doesn't ''work''. It's a ''cheat''."
▲** [[Critical Research Failure|Of course, Koreans eat rice with a spoon.]] They eat other dishes with chopsticks.
▲* The British "Adult" comic [[Viz]] ran several parodies of this in the ''Spot The Clue'' strip. A whodunnit situation is shown, with the reader being asked to work out who the perpetrator is. Each time the villain is the one who made an innocuous error, ranging from incorrectly describing the era of a piece of furniture, [[Take That|to claiming to have been sending emails on a piece of hardware that everyone knows is too unreliable to work.]]
▲** Also parodied, along with The Famous Five and The Daily Mail, in the [[Viz]] comic "Jack Black", where a 1940s boy detective with somewhat conservative views would use the most spurious of inconsistencies or counter-factual clues in a person's story to reveal them to be the week's villain (perpetrators of such dastardly deeds as using fake wooden pips to fool people into thinking that "cheap" raspberry jam was "luxury" strawberry jam). Often the villain would be sentenced to death or a comically excessive prison sentence for their "crimes".
▲* In an example similar to [[Encyclopedia Brown]], we have the Belgian comic character Ludo (not related to [[Ludo|that band]]) who was a detective constantly resolving mysteries and crimes by pointing out that the criminal inevitably was the guy with the black socks. It was always about the black socks, even that one time where he pursued a shoplifter in a bathroom to discover that the guy in question was one of ''five identical quintuplets.'' So yeah. [[Space Whale Aesop|Don't wear black socks or else a Belgian detective will pin a murder charge on you.]]
▲* In the 1944 [[Sherlock Holmes]] movie ''The Spider Woman'', Holmes deduces that a series of apparent suicides were really murders because "suicides invariably leave notes behind them," and none of these people did. Actually, no more than about 20% of suicides leave a note.
* A rather amusing in-universe example in ''[[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]]''. When O'Brien is marked for death by some crazy aliens because he's one of the last people alive who knows how a forbidden superweapon works, they send a bogus video back to the Federation that shows him dying in an accident. His wife realizes something's fishy because he's drinking coffee in the video and she knows he never drinks coffee in the afternoon, when the video was supposedly taken. But then after the plot is foiled and Miles comes back home, as he's settling in [[Brick Joke|he asks for a cup of coffee]]. She reacts with astonishment, and he says he drinks coffee in the afternoon all the time!
<!-- ** This is possibly also a [[Shout-Out]] to ''[[Airplane!]]'', where the wife of one of the passengers become suspicious over his behaviour because "Jim ''never'' has a second cup of coffee!".
*** Actually, the ''Airplane!'' joke was a [[Shout-Out]] to a coffee commercial that ran around the same time. -->
* In an episode of ''[[Judge Judy]]'', a man is trying to collect money owed to him by a woman who rented a room from him. He says he provided her with an invoice each month and brought '''copies''' showing how much the woman owed him. The invoices had the invoice date on each of them, but they also had a date in the header or footer showing the date they were printed. Judge Judy points out that these invoices are fake because they all have the same date. The guy made the argument that the invoices were created when he said they were, pointing to the invoice dates, but the other date was the current date, the date he printed them. Judy said something like, "I'm not stupid, you know," and ruled in favor of the woman who owed him the money, because apparently to her it's impossible that anyone printing a copy of something would record the date the copy was printed.
** Still, Judy has a point; invoice copies are supposed to be printed on the same date as the actual invoice. A real court would (and should) be skeptical if there's no proof that the invoices were not tampered with.
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** It may have been snark, but it was also based on truth. Some of the latest research indicates that people who are lying are more likely to look you in the eyes to make you believe what they're saying and people who are comfortable in what they are saying tend to look in any direction they feel like because they don't need to fully concentrate on what they're saying.
** There [[Ms. Fanservice|is a reason]] why Sophie doesn't often deal with men looking directly into her eyes.
* In the last minute of an episode of ''[[Bull]]'' a federal agent accused of providing inaccurate testimony about a supposedly wrongfully convicted man "proves" she saw everything clearly by identifying the murder weapon as a "9mm Glock". Besides being incredibly non-specific in reality (Glock has made '''10''' separate models in 9x19mm, and an additional 3 in 9x17mm, with as many as five different generations for each. These models and generations ''are'' distinguishable from each other), identifying a pistol as "9mm" at half the distance she saw the man is essentially impossible even on a still photograph with the muzzle in focus. In reality this confidence in a fact she could not physically have witnessed (but could have easily learned from elsewhere) points towards her knowledge having been contaminated by other evidence, if not outright deliberately perjurous, rendering her eyewitness testimony dubious.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* [[In-Universe|Used in-story]] in ''[[Tales of the Questor]]'', Quentyn says that some human coins are forged because the heads are facing the wrong way. He's wrong {{spoiler|about the heads. [[Right for the Wrong Reasons|The coins, however, really are forged]] and a guard sees a tradesman's look of utter horror, tipping the guard off to who's behind the forgeries}}.
== [[Real Life]] ==
* After encountering Panzerbrigade 150 [[Dressing as the Enemy]] during the Battle of the Bulge, American soldiers in [[World War II]] became very paranoid of spies, resulting in sentries started asking questions [[No True Scotsman|real Americans]] would know to root out any further German infiltrators (in reality all ''10'' people the Wehrmacht could find with the right language ability and accent to impersonate were already expended). One unfortunate MP asked a man dressed as a general what the capitol of Illinois is, and arrested him for "wrongly" answering "Springfield", not realizing Chicago was merely its largest city. Turns out the man dressed as a general really was General Omar Bradley, who was not amused.
{{reflist}}
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