Fair Play Whodunnit: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|''"Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?"''|'''[[G. K. Chesterton]]''''s oath for membership for the British Detective Club.}}

 

The opposite of a [[Clueless Mystery]]; the puzzle of the story is entirely solvable before [[The Reveal]] or [[The Summation]], if you've spotted the clues, and not just by [[Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize|various methods]] of being a [[Genre Savvy]] reader/viewer.

:7. [[Detective Mole|The detective must not himself commit the crime.]]

:8. The detective must not light on any clues which are [[Clueless Mystery|not instantly produced]] for the inspection of the reader.

:10. [[Twin Switch|Twin brothers]], and [[Body Double|doubles]] generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

 

 

Though increasingly rare in modern mystery literature (and in any media outside of print), in the "Golden Age" of mystery, novels were almost entirely of this type (though even then, some were better about the "fair" part than others).

 

Done badly, this can lead to [[Conviction by Contradiction]]. Done correctly, and it turns into what Golden Age writer John Dickson Carr called "The Grandest Game in the World."

 

== Anime and Manga ==

* Two manga, ''[[The Kindaichi Case Files]]'' and ''[[Case Closed]]'', based upon teenagers solving mysteries, give you the information to unveil the killer before the solution is officially "revealed" - Kindaichi much more so, because the translators go through more effort to translate the evidence to English, while to solve the Detective Conan mysteries, once in a while you'll need to know various Japanese references, names, and pronunciations.

** The anime is sometimes good about playing fair, and other times shamelessly cheats. It depends on the writer, though the show seems to cheat more nowadays than they did in earlier seasons. Any story based on the manga will still be fair play, though, ''unless'' something crucial is [[Compressed Adaptation|cut during the shift from manga to anime]].

* ''[[The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya]]'' has the mystery episode "Remote Island Syndrome". The first part of the episode seems to be a regular [[Beach Episode|fun-filled day on a private island]]. That episode secretly contains almost all the clues you need to solve the mystery presented in the second half, although if you don't expect the mystery, you could easily miss them.

 

== Comic Books ==

* Played with in ''[[Deep Red]]''; an early scene actually shows the face of the murderer, but it's done so quickly - and before you know to look for it - that most people never catch on.

* The Japanese film ''The Laughing Policeman'' plays with this trope. Many clues are given from the outset, but many are so subtle at first that the detectives don't notice them at all until towards the end. It also subverts this by having someone {{spoiler|kill the [[Big Bad]]}} offscreen just as the cops plan to arrest him. This is only to reveal the ''real'' mastermind, the titular Laughing Policeman {{spoiler|who never gets figured out}}.

 

== Literature ==

* Scott Turow's ''[[Presumed Innocent]]'' delicately scatters its clues amidst character development and the trial plotline—all the reader needs is in the text.

* The [[Lord Darcy]] mysteries are an interesting case, in that they violate Rule #2 (since some of the characters have magical powers) and still manage to play fair with the reader. However, since the universe the stories are set in [[Magic A Is Magic A|has consistent magical rules]], Rule #2 could be said to be broken in letter but not in spirit. In some of the stories the whole point is that everyone assumes an impossible murder was done by magic, and Lord Darcy explains how it could have been committed in a perfectly mundane way. Magic is mostly used for forensics.

 

 

* ''[[Murder, She Wrote]]'' actually had quite a few, given that the killers usually revealed themselves by [[I Never Said It Was Poison|saying something only the killer would know or assume]].

* The occasional ''[[Law and Order]]'' spin-off (although not [[Law & Order|the original]], for reasons related to its structure) will do this, probably more or less by accident.

* ''[[Sleuth 101]]''

* "A Study in Pink" on BBC's ''[[Sherlock]]'' was fair play for the "who" part if not the "how" and "why." The audience knows what all five victims had in common - {{spoiler|taking a taxi}} - and they are also aware of at least some of Sherlock's thought processes ("Who do we trust, even though we don't know them? Who passes unnoticed wherever they go? Who hunts in the middle of a crowd?"). Sherlock said that the murderer must have {{spoiler|driven the victim somewhere}} and when John texts the murderer, a {{spoiler|taxi}} shows up at the crime scene - Sherlock and John initially assume it must be the {{spoiler|passenger}}, not realizing that it's actually the {{spoiler|driver.}} Viewers had enough information to figure it out before the climax.

 

 

== Video Games ==

* The two mystery subquests in ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]]'' play completely fair, given that it's up to you to solve them. (Admittedly, one isn't much of a mystery, though.)

* In the ''[[Ace Attorney]]'' games, since the focus is entirely on the clues and how they fit together, it is occasionally entirely possible to figure out who the killer is before [[The Reveal]]. This is, of course, when the mystery isn't already a [[Reverse Whodunnit]], or [[Clueless Mystery]]. The hard part, of course, is proving it.

** It gets ridiculous in the last case of ''[[Ace Attorney Investigations]]''. Edgeworth figures out the culprit easily, but proving exactly what happened and how it was done is such a laborious process that you're given a save point in the middle of the interrogation.

== Web Original ==

* ''The Big Idea'' of the [[Whateley Universe]] is a Fair Play Whodunnit, even though the superpowers of the characters add complications over the usual detective story. The reader even has more information than Reach, the character who plays the detective in the story.

 

== Western Animation ==

[[Category:Fair Play Whodunnit]]

[[Category:Mystery Tropes]]