How about one where I, the reader or viewer, am the murderer?
The butler?
Hey, that irascible colonel would still be alive now if you hadn’t picked up the book and started reading.
You craved his death, didn’t you? And why? Not for monetary gain, not for revenge, but simply for the thrill it gave you. But not even the thrill of his death. No, he had to die simply so you could enjoy the unravelling of the mystery. You read him into an early grave out of simple boredom. You monster.
There are various works of metafiction where characters “die” because they’re not being read. And ones where the author is the murderer (or the victim).
But the reader as murderer? That’s a challenge, unless you mean in a “Choose Your Own Adventure” way.
Also the case with Trek in THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, when Lt. Valeris — Spock’s handpicked top-of-her-class intended replacement — leads the investigation into the murders she managed.
I think there were a few in TV Shows (NCIS and Castle I believe). I don’t recall the episode names.
The plot of Shutter Island is very close:
The protagonist is a Federal Marshall who visits an island hospital for the criminally insane to look into the disappearance of a patient who killed her three children.
It’s later revealed that the protagonist was actually a patient on the island, having gone insane from guilt after killing his wife for drowning their three children. He escaped into a fantasy of being a lawman investigating a crime very similar to his own experience, and the hospital staff indulged him, thinking it might be therapeutic for him (spoiler: it wasn’t).
There must be a SciFi story where the murderer is the detective, who mind-wiped himself or herself after committing the murders, and gradually discovers that he is the killer after investigating the crimes.
Anyone remember any films, TV programmes or stories like this? The plot device sounds vaguely familiar - perhaps I’ve been mind-wiped myself and forgotten it.
Shouldn’t we include everybody’s favorite theory about Murder She Wrote?
Does Oedipus Rex count?
There is also No Way Out IIRC its a pretty unremarkable 80s spy thriller except for the twist ending.
Memento sort of has this plot IIRC.
The original murder of his wife wasn’t carried out by the protaganist, but it turns out the murder of his cop buddy (who’d been stringing him along for years to use as his own personal amnesiac hitman after he actually got revenge on his wife’s murderer, but forgot about it) was.
Memento Mori by Jonathan Nolan gets close to that.
Similar, in a way, is No Way Out - the detective’s boss committed the murder and and wants the detective to run a cover-up investigation…in which the false evidence points (unknowingly to the boss) to the detective himself.
That is nice.
Thanks!
One of the stories of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror just had this basic plot last night (11/5/2023).
I wonder if it inspired the question
Which is the same basic plot as The Big Clock, of which No Way Out was a remake.
There is one Christie novel where Poirot is “the detective”, but the culprit is
the local detective inspector (“Hercule Poirot’s Christmas”).
This one still annoys me, because the buried clues that should make it a revelation are so tenuous that the solution just seems to come out of thin air, or to require clairvoyance of some kind. I don’t mind being fooled by a clever author, but not this way.
But Hastings was never the culprit. And I am at a loss to think of any other sidekicks in any of her series books. Please, @StarvingButStrong, can you enlighten us which story this is?
Unless you mean
“The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” where the narrator is the culprit, and also a recent friend of Poirot during his abortive retirement? Hardly a sidekick, though.