The Butler Did It/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: The butler is the murderer.

  • Straight: The Butler Did It, and everyone is genuinely surprised.
  • Exaggerated: All the butlers in the city go on a killing spree, and nobody suspects a thing.
  • Downplayed: The butler did it... "it" being leaving the toilet seat up.
    • The butler did not do it, but he was a vital part of the crime.
    • The butler broke his master's leg.
  • Justified: The butler did it because he's actually an assassin that took the job to be Beneath Suspicion.
    • A butler is someone who, in a wealthy household, has a great deal of access both to the 'upstairs' and 'downstairs' areas, is usually a trusted and respected part of the household and, as a servant, may be receive a lot of poor treatment. They tend to know the hidden secrets of the household and the various enmities and weaknesses of those within it that can be exploited, and know where various weapons, etc are kept. They're usually organized, discreet, thoughtful and methodical. All helpful things if you were planning to kill someone...
    • The master is not Nice to the Waiter, and the butler knows that if he quits, he will not get a character and so will starve. Years of slights finally resulted in an outbrust.
  • Inverted: Everyone except the butler did it.
    • The butler is the detective that finds out the real killer.
  • Subverted: The butler is the prime suspect at the beginning, and is later found innocent.
  • Double Subverted: The butler is the prime suspect at the beginning, but then eliminated as a suspect -- except he did do it, and the exonerating evidence is false.
  • Parodied: The killer makes a long speech about how he always wanted to be a butler.
    • Putting on a butler suit brainwashes the wearer to commit murder.
    • The victim doesn't even have a butler, there are no butlers anywhere around, and somehow the butler still did it.
    • Butlers learn their trade at butler camp where they are taught cleaning, cooking, and murdering.
  • Deconstructed: The butler is a serial killer with an inferiority complex and a fetish for butler attire. Carrying out his twisted desires, he engages on a murder spree of finding butler jobs and murdering his masters.
  • Reconstructed: The butler has a Freudian Excuse - his parents were killed by their butler, and he was forced to live in an orphanage, which ruined his childhood.
  • Zig Zagged: The butler did it, but he was under Mind Control at the time. And it later turns out that the one mind controlling the butler looked exactly like the butler. And then we find out that it was actually his Evil Twin, who was also a butler. But it was a conspiracy and the butler has a Memory Gambit to maintain deniability.
  • Averted: The household does not employ a butler.
  • Enforced: The butler had to be the killer, because the producer was aiming for target audience of people who never read mysteries before.
    • A person high up in the production had a slow incompetent butler, and writes the story to get revenge.
  • Implied: The detective rules out all the guests one-by-one, but in the end he fails to find the real killer. The astute reader notices he never bothered to investigate the butler.
  • Lampshaded: "So the butler did it! I Always Wanted to Say That."
  • Invoked: "We should investigate the butler. It's always the butler in the movies."
  • Exploited: Someone in need of a hitman goes to the butler, knowing he's good at killing people.
  • Defied: "We have to lock all the butlers up before they can kill!"
  • Discussed: "Unlike what you may read in detective stories, the butler is an unlikely suspect in any murder investigation of this sort."
  • Conversed: "In these shows, the butler always does it."
  • Played for Laughs: The Butler did it, but it took him three hundred and seventeen tries (and we're shown twelve), all of which his master escaped without realizing anything was happening (including the time when he walked up and shot his master, which the master passed off as "you could've hurt someone, mistaking that gun for a lighter.").
  • Played for Drama: The butler did it, but is quite sympathetic, and the reasons he did it are explored in great detail.

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