Isaac Asimov, who also wrote a bunch of straight mysteries, once said that it was incredibly hard to think up new twists for mystery plots. Agatha Christie, all by herself, had thought up all the good ones already, he said. This thread is evidence of how true that is.
Heck, you could even count Christie’s signature work towards the OP.
[spoiler]Murder On The Orient Express is essentially a locked-room mystery, since the killer was one of the dozen passengers on the train car – and so Poirot is, in effect, being asked to clear eleven obvious suspects – as the evidence is, by definition, sufficient to get each of 'em in trouble with the authorities unless our hero establishes their innocence before they reach the next stop: it’ll only be smooth sailing for Obvious Suspects #1-#11 if he can prove Obvious Suspect #12 guilty, right?
The twist, of course, is that all twelve of the obvious suspects entered the compartment and stabbed the guy – and so, as per the OP, whichever one was the most obvious suspect wasn’t cleared, but was simply revealed at the summation to have been guilty all along.[/spoiler]
I just finished reading a Nero Wolfe novel where this arguably happens. (In fact, whether Wolfe can win the argument becomes a bit of a plot point.)
[SPOILER]The League Of Frightened Men has a Harvard grad turn up dead – poisoned! – and while the cops figure it was probably suicide, his fellow alums disagree: they each got a letter taking credit and threatening more, from the guy they all crippled in a hazing-gone-wrong back when; they all got a similar letter when another alum fell to his death, and just now got another shortly after a third such alum became a missing person.
Wolfe draws up a rather odd contract, specifying that he’ll get paid upon making sure they have nothing to fear from the guy who poisoned Alum #1; they’ll have nothing to fear from the guy who wrote those letters, he spells out, adding that he’ll collect if a majority of signers agree he’s done a satisfactory job – which they assume means the murderer will be locked away.
So cue the long investigation, and – well, shucks, the cops were right; the most likely explanation for the poisoning was what actually happened, as Alum #1 really did commit suicide; the hazed guy wouldn’t hurt a fly, but wanted revenge and so took it by just writing a bunch of letters: he wrote some after Alum #2 died in a mere accident, and wrote some more after Alum #3 was so terrified as to go into hiding. That’s it. That’s all.
And so, Wolfe argues, he’s satisfied the terms of the contract: Alum #1 poisoned himself, and so has been dead all along; they thus have nothing to fear from him, or from a mere letter-writer who aforementionedly wouldn’t hurt a fly. He puts it to a vote…
…and loses, 8 to 7. Still, though, (a) that’s 7 folks who agree with him, and (b) Wolfe then starts mentioning other crimes he’s discovered along the way – such as this one, committed by one of the alums who’d voted “no” on paying up – and in no time flat, there’s a quick switch in votes for the win.[/SPOILER]
The final Biography of O.J. Simpson.
There’s another Agatha Christie,
whose title I cannot remember, in which the murdered frames himself for the murder, but intentionally does a poor job at it, the idea being that the police will realize that he was framed and subsequently dismiss him as a suspect.
At the risk of someone shouting ‘zombie,’ let me add one more Christie:
[spoiler]CURTAIN, where a bunch of folks have been killed and each time a different person with means and motive and opportunity has been the incredibly obvious suspect. Poirot explains to Hastings that he suspects someone else – call him X – was the murderer in every case. We’re told, point-blank, that “X is the murderer.” (Indeed, we’re told that “X had committed all the murders.”) Hastings reasons as follows: “It meant – if anything at all was to make sense – that it was not Colonel Luttrell who shot Mrs. Luttrell, but X … therefore the case fell into line exactly with those other cases – with the case of the labourer Riggs, who didn’t remember but supposed he must have done it; with Maggie Litchfield, who went out of her mind and gave herself up – for a crime she had not committed.”
When someone almost dies right in front of him, Hastings therefore does his best to deduce how X must have worked it: Okay, he reasons, we all saw the ‘hunting accident’ when our host fired at something moving in the poor light – and his suddenly-bleeding wife then cried out in pain; by luck, her gunshot wound wasn’t fatal. But if she’d died, he would’ve promptly confessed to what we all witnessed, right? Why, they wouldn’t even bother matching the bullet to his rifle! So if Poirot is right, then maybe X took aim and simply waited until an incredibly obvious suspect fired a careless shot!
Hastings is wrong; that’s not at all what Poirot meant. X doesn’t get away with murder by framing other people; he goads people, Iago-style, into doing the actual killings; if it looks like an incredibly obvious suspect shot or poisoned or bludgeoned someone, that’s what happened. So ignore how Hastings assumes – and narrates to us – that it’s “a crime she had not committed”: it’s a crime she had committed, sure as the guy facing penal servitude keeps serving his life sentence as the book ends, and the woman who poisoned her husband is still executed, and so on. Poirot isn’t, as we’re led to believe, out to clear their names; he’s merely out to stop X.[/spoiler]
Not sure why I’m putting this in spoiler tags, but just to be on the safe side. I don’t know how to hint at what’s inside without negating the need for spoiler tags. Hmm…
I don’t recall all the details (read it far too many years ago), but I’m pretty sure that Who Censored Roger Rabbit (the book that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was based off) kind of fits the OP.
Christie’s first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, has something like this plot. That is,
The suspect is arrested fairly early on and Poirot says something like “I wish he hadn’t been arrested now” (only more ambiguous, as he likes to do). The suspect is then exonerated somehow, and released. Then later Poirot is able to prove that the original suspect was guilty all along, and that what he had meant before is that it was too soon to arrest him, there wasn’t enough evidence but there would be later. It’s been a while since I read that book, but I’m pretty sure that’s the gist of the plot. And I didn’t read the whole thread, so sorry if this has already been mentioned.
Roddy
Post #15. (I blame the probably-unnecessary spoilers.)
I read this novel when I was about 19. I still remember the feeling of WTF as I scrabbled back to the first page to discover that yes, Boscombe was clearly absolved by the narrator. A total ripoff. It’s been more than 30 years now–I knew exactly what book you were talking about and even remembered the name Boscombe.
As long as we seem to be going for completeness here, there was an episode of the short-lived Rob Morrow series The Whole Truth that had this twist. Rob’s defense team successfully got the suspect acquitted, and then we the audience are shown something that makes it clear he was guilty all along. I’m afraid I don’t remember specifically which episode, though.
Sorry about the peculiarities with the spoiler tags…evidently I still have some things to learn about spoilering.
Just to give credit where it’s due…the sentence in my previous post beginning “He was a master of deception” was Exapno’s. So was the info in the first spoiler box. My own words begin with “I read thjis novel…” and continue through the spoiler box at the bottom.
Sorry about that, Ulf the Unwashed. I re-edited the post so all the correct text is attributed to Exapno Mapcase.
On the TV show Jonathan Creek, episode 2 of Season 1,
Maddy and a convict’s sister successfully campaign to have the man released from prison because they are so sure of his innocence. Come to find out at the end, the guy really did kill the girl that he went to prison for killing but the girl’s husband was also in on it (he arranged it and stayed in touch with the murderer, promising to take care of him - which he did). At the end, the murderer kills the husband and himself because of the guilt he developed while in prison.
My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, Exapno Mapcase thanks you (I presume), and I thank you.
Yet another Christie:
[spoiler]MURDER IN THREE ACTS.
First, retired stage actor Sir Charles is hosting a party – overplaying his part as The Retired Guy Who Now Hosts Parties – when an aging clergyman with a medical condition drops dead as if poisoned. Sir Charles promptly gets into character and starts playing detective; he’s promptly told to knock it off, since it’s obvious to Poirot and the other partygoers that nobody could’ve pulled that off in plain sight, if anyone had a motive for murdering the guy, which, as far as they can tell, no one did.
Sir Charles then makes a big deal about leaving the country for a while – but comes back after someone else drops dead, as if poisoned, at another party with many of the same guests! The cops figure The Butler Did It, and so are looking all over for him; Sir Charles, sure he was right all along, is determined to prove it was someone who was at both parties. He thus heads to the butler’s room, gets into character as said butler, and swiftly discovers half-written notes (a) stashed in an odd hiding place the cops missed, and (b) making it clear the butler spotted the poisoner in action at Party #2 and would gladly vanish in exchange for a blackmail payoff.
Poirot shows up, embarrassedly apologizes for ever doubting Sir Charles, and strikes a deal with him to work as a team – Sir Charles will fake being the next victim, Poirot will investigate – and at the summation, we learn the blackmail notes were a red herring; the butler killed Victim #2. As per the OP, that prime-suspect butler asked a sleuth to clear his name – because “the butler” was Sir Charles, ‘vanishing’ by simply taking off his disguise before ‘discovering’ the blackmail notes right where he left them! (Victim #1? Killed by Sir Charles as a mere dress rehearsal, so the actor could see whether his murder-in-plain-sight plot would fool an audience!)[/spoiler]
That’s
Towards Zero. The murderer frames himself poorly for the murder, and frames his ex-wife very well for both the murder and the initial frame-up.
That’s the first one I thought of when I read the OP, but I can’t remember whether Poirot is actually hired to exonerate the murderer, or just wanders in.
The plot to John D. MacDonald’s The Scarlet Ruse was very similar. Travis McGee is investigating a case of grand larceny and a cover-up murder, and finally realizes he’s been banging the main culprit all along. She’s eventually killed in an ambush/shootout with her accomplice, and the bodies are disposed of in the Atlantic. (Old John D. never was one for legal process.)
A Bones episode in the first season.
A three part episode of Medium.
I’d be more specific but I still don’t know how to make spoiler boxes.
Not murder, but one of Asimov’s BLACK WIDOWERS stories:
[spoiler]TRUTH TO TELL, where the guest has but one virtue: he never lies. He’s rude, pedantic, and in trouble at a job he owes to family connections – suspected of stealing cash and bonds out of a company safe to pay off his gambling debts – but, again, he never lies, and he keeps flatly insisting the he didn’t take the cash or the bonds.
Still, he’s apparently the only person who could’ve done it, and so remains under a cloud of suspicion; to clear his name, Mister Honesty asks the dining club of armchair sleuths to come up with a possible explanation for how someone could’ve done it. And so they start pitching and picking apart a bunch of scenarios – until their waiter asks whether the guy who didn’t take the cash or the bonds took the cash and the bonds. Mister Always-Speaks-The-Literal-Truth storms off in a huff.[/spoiler]