There’s one where a dog is the initial suspect.
And as for “the butler did it”, there’s one where the culprit turns out to be someone posing as the butler, and I think at least one other where she used a similar device (no-one takes any notice of the help).
Haven’t read any Christie for a while. I recall the following, any hints for the ones I’m missing?
the police detective ?
the obnoxious kid detective ?
the unreliable narrator - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
the apparent intended victim - The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
one of the actual victims - And Then There Were None
everybody - Murder in the Orient Express
random bystanders - ? (In The ABC Murders the victims were made to look random, but were not)
Hercules Poirot - Curtain
I just watched one! Acts of Vengeance , starring Antonio Bandaras, is about a broken hearted and very angry man who is turning over heaven and earth to find the murder of this wife and daughter. When he finally finds him, it is a shocker.
The first one is mentioned above: The Mousetrap
The obnoxious child one is Crooked House.
Mad Magazine once ran a Western parody where a gunslinger named Tex sets out to find and kill the man who shot his partner. It ends with Tex dutifully shooting himself in the head after learning that he shot his partner himself while sleepwalking…
Spoilers!
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the first one I thought of, but Poirot is obviously not the killer.
It is, however, the narrator who is relating the murder and investigation. It goes from his essentially bragging about getting away with it to his, I think, suicide note. Poirot catches him and he closes the book indicating he will now kill himself.
To the best of my knowledge from 25+ years ago.
I did once see a TV episode with this synopsis:
How about an Oscar-winning (best foreign language film) 1970 Italian crime drama?
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
A top detective commits a murder and then steers the investigation away from, and then back towards, himself to demonstrate that he is indeed a citizen above suspicion…
Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel
The last Agatha Christie I read was over 30 years ago, so I’m sure I have just forgotten.
You know, that one arguably counts for this thread: the retired stage actor who’s at the party where A dies tries to melodramatically play sleuth, only to get told knock it off, Charles; there’s no reason to suspect it was murder — but, when B keels over at a later date, Charles gets the You Were Right All Along treatment and shows up to investigate: teasing out, before a witness, that B got a call involving C right before making an odd remark to the butler. Charles gets into character as that butler and finds where Hey I Know Stuff So Pay Me Money first-draft letters got hidden; he also pantomimes as that butler until someone who saw B die can, jogged-memory style, state definitively which wrist the butler had a distinctive mark on. He also also draws everyone’s attention to that call involving C before C, too dies; people thus ask: what was the connection between A and C? Who wanted A dead? What could C have told us?
The thing is, there was no connection between A and C, and nobody wanted A dead. Charles was just out to poison someone at the party (and didn’t care if it was A or, uh, X or Y or Z, which is why it doesn’t look like anyone could’ve planned it) before posing as a butler to poison his real target, B — and then he did all that act-like-the-butler stuff so people would make the mistake of poring over those red-herring letters while going on a dead-end search for a phony birthmark. Oh, and since B got that call regarding C, Charles shrugged and killed C solely to make it seem like someone with an A-B-C motive was at work.
You could even say he plays Watson, to Poirot as Holmes: Charles will showily pretend to die in front of a small group, so Poirot can scan the faces of those present to see if someone displays a weird reaction: double the surprise, because they had a uniquely good reason to figure the poisoner wouldn’t strike again? Or: comically less surprise, because they had a uniquely good reason to figure the poisoner hasn’t actually struck again? (The answer, of course, is that, no, Charles only wants to act like he’s trying to help — but he sure wouldn’t mind if someone overreacts, or underreacts; and, as luck would have it, someone does.)
The Eighth Detective, by Alex Pavesi, which is a short story collection. This happens in more than one of the stories.
There was a Kojak episode, reading the list it could have been “The Goodluck Bomber”, number 21 of season 2 (February 9, 1975) where the friend that helped him solve a series of bombing that could not be defused was the one to plant the bombs. Almost 50 years ago, my recolection is hazy.
And for the dog who did it or maybe not, there is always The Hound of the Baskervilles.
There’s a Fred Brown atory in which the reader (you) is the intended victim (the killer is right behind you)
There’s a movie called Juggernaut from about the same time. Several bombs have been placed on an ocean liner, and a bomb disposal squad (led by Richard Harris) are tasked with disarming them. When the bomber is found, he turns out to be Harris’s mentor. I don’t recall if he’d been helping the investigation before being discovered.
There is a converation between the two which gives Harris the information he needs to disarm the bomb, although the way it plays out is rather maddening.
This is sort of what happens in Robert Sheckley’s The Status Civilization. The protagonist finds himself exiled to a prison planet for crimes he can;t remember (he was mindwiped), but it turns out that the guy who sent him was himself.
The novel is memorable for a number of reasons, one of them being that I think this is where they got most of the material for the Arnold Schwarzeneggar/Paul Veerhoeven film Total Recall. That movie is nominally based on Philip K. Dick’s short story “We can Remember it for you Wholesale”, but they exhaust most of that plot in the first 15 minutes or so. The rest – going to another planet, the mindwipe, the mutants with psi ability, the people always trying to kill the protagonist – that’s all in the Sheckley book.
And that idiocy about the oxygen mine, Og only knows where they got that from. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Princes of Mars, maybe.
Fredric Brown once wrote a short story where the reader is the Victim (not the murderer, but interesting enough.)
For a weirdly passive example, there’s Rehearsal For Murder, where a grieving playwright has some ‘theater’ types over and has them start acting out scenes he says he’s been writing for a whodunit: so, a scene establishing a motive for this character (which, it becomes increasingly obvious, is a lot like the actor saying the lines) and then one for that character (which, y’know, likewise, for Actor #2), and so on, and so on — and, the playwright soon reveals, oh, hey, standing right here is the homicide investigator who tentatively concluded it was suicide a year ago, that’s right, Lieutenant McElroy, and I’m guessing everyone here who didn’t kill my beloved would be willing to help search for the truth, and so if one of you storms off the Lieutenant “would have to wonder why you would be so anxious to leave” — and methinks the guilty party will protest too much, even while any innocent looking to legitimately remove suspicion from themselves will now have a powerful incentive to throw someone else under the bus, if any of you know stuff that neither I nor the Lieutenant knows. So, (a) let’s keep doing scenes, and (b) let the motivated bickering begin in earnest!
As you’ve probably guessed, the “This Is Your Show; I’m Just Here To Watch” guy is not, in fact, here to be convinced of anyone’s innocence or guilt; he’s less the pride of the local police department, and more the man that the playwright suspects. So, here’s to hoping he eventually slips up and says something incriminating!