Fair Play Whodunnit: Difference between revisions

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{{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.

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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."

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== 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.

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* ''[[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.

* The 1975 [[NBC]] series ''[[Ellery Queen]]''. Better yet, it always had a [[No Fourth Wall]] moment [[Once an Episode|every episode]], immediately following Ellery's mandatory [[Eureka Moment]], during which he would turn to the audience, briefly review the key evidence for the viewers, and ask them if they'd figured out who the culprit was.

** This was a trademark of its predecessor radio show as well.

== 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.)

** There are a ~~LOT~~ of [[Red Herring]]s to make it look more difficult than it is—especially given the black and white morality of the rest of the game.

** There are a ''lot'' of [[Red Herring]]s to make it look more difficult than it is—especially given the black and white morality of the rest of the game.

* 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.