Well yes, there is that. It would be surprising if my favorite mystery authors didn’t provide such a conclusion.
One of the better mystery books I have read that wasn’t a whodunnit was a Scandinavian mystery book set in the 1980s where the premise is about a murder that took place 40 years earlier during WW2. The case was solved and the murderer was arrested, convicted, jailed for a long time and died recently having never revealed why he did it. And one thing that was never determined was the identity of the victim who the police found out was living alone under an alias despite being a respected and long time member of town. Instead of whodunnit it was a whowasit and using police reports from the day of evidence and information (such as the fact there was no sign of a struggle indicating the victim knew his killer) inquiring with members of town and the force who were still alive from that time set off this investigation.
This pissed me off immensely when I read the book. What had been a good character study was fully ruined.
I was thinking of the first season of Broadchurch (never bothered with the others). I enjoyed it, but if there were any obvious clues as to the culprit I didn’t pick up on it. Cue people lining up to tell it was glaringly obvious from the start 
. But I think that season at least was more about the journey than the destination.
I think we were thinking of different shows as above 
.
I once read something Stephen King said about writing: if, at the end of the book, he couldn’t surprise himself, then how could he expect to surprise others? That kind of blew my mind because I thought along the lines of Poe, choosing words to create a preconceived goal…but also making sure you don’t paint yourself into a corner, leave a contradicting fact, etc.?
But if you write it loosely enough, you can do a “Clue,” where multiple explanations might fit. I’ll go with #3, where Madeline Kahn gives the “flames” performance around 1:45.
You’re right, I thought you were referring to Behind Her Eyes, which even has a thread here. No spoilers, but the conflict of opinion about the ending was all over the media a couple weeks ago.
IIRC, there’s a Nero Wolfe story where — spoilers? — each person who was there On The Night Of The Murder says their piece about what they saw when it all went down; and, after thinking it over for quite some time as if he rather than the reader is playing armchair sleuth to a fair-play mystery that’s been presented with just the right amount of detail, Wolfe eventually tells the guy who’ll be doing all the legwork exactly what to say to the woman they’ll be hitting with a blackmail request, on the strength of one key remark from an eyewitness.
Oh, and then say the same thing to the other woman they’ll be hitting up for blackmail. And then say it to another woman they’ll be hitting up for blackmail. Really, just work your way down that whole list there, and, well, let’s see if only one person reacts interestingly.
Yeah, I’ve been listening to a Lincoln Child/Douglas Preston audiobook on a road trip, and just yesterday I realized that I’m so enamored of the setting (ghost town on a mesa) and the characters and the forensic pathology… that I’m not keeping track of clues. I really don’t care whodunnit. I care how the protagonist feels about the spooky decaying brothel.
I totally am. With whiteboards, and different-colored markers. Might take me two weeks to get through an Agatha Christie, but I do solve them.
One of the best is a children’s (really, more like YA-- I’d say, very intelligent 11, to maybe 15 or 16) book, called The Westing Game. It won a Newbery-- I think it’s the only one where an animal doesn’t die-- anyway, the solution is blindingly obvious when you get to the end, but it was obscured by the gonzo-whopper of all red herrings.
Maybe technically a children’s book, but enjoyable for adults-- I reread it a few years ago-- it’s a rereadable mystery. I don’t think it’s been out-of-print since it was published in the early 70s. And except for the unfortunate reference (in dialogue) to a person with trisomy 21 as “mongoloid,” it holds up really well.
Exactly. And even with House, you keep up. He’s one step ahead, but not 21 steps.
Monk, once fully emerged, was more of a “whydidit?” Seemingly senseless acts of destruction or cruelty make no sense until Monk figures out the truth of the scenario.
I found those really interesting.
But yeah, the transitional phase, before it really got a footing, was annoying.
There are actually a lot of different types of endings to those stories, including the rare occasions where Wolfe left his house. In one case he engaged in murder, sort of. If I can recall the details correctly, he induced the perpetrator to kill himself with poison gas up in the Wolfe’s orchid rooms thinking that he was really killing Wolfe or Archie or something.
Do we really need spoilers for stuff this old? Oh well, why not, no need to ruin it for people who like solving the mystery.
I appreciate them, as there are many older books that I haven’t read yet but hope to get to someday. (The Nero Wolfe books, for example, were already old when I was born, so it’s not like I would have read them when they were new.)
There are all different types of mysteries. I tend to disfavor the ones in which the solution is nothing you would’ve had any reason to suspect. Have to admit, my preference tends towards thrillers over mysteries.
One of the reasons I never really got into Sherlock Holmes was that the stories largely relied on his powers of observation/deduction, but the stories lacked sufficient info for the reader to apply THEIR powers.
Oh, but it was elementary.
The true “fair play” mystery died around 1950. I collect vintage paperbacks from that period and most of them of mysteries. You can watch the proportion of classic mysteries fall precipitously after the war. What replaced them? Private eyes, spies, police, crime, suspense, hardboiled gunk of all description.
If you look at the older Big Names mentioned in this thread, you’ll see that all of them were established before the war. They kept going afterward, but they were never the same. Virtually every one of the books they’re famed for appeared before 1950. The hundreds of lesser writers who imitated them either faded away or started writing in the newer forms or simply stopped writing true fair play mysteries, with solutions that were surprises but not solvable. (Of course, there were many of those earlier as well, solutions where motives or means or vital clues weren’t revealed until the detective announced the killer. You’ve probably never heard of the books or the authors, though, for that reason.)
I know that “cozies” eventually took the place of the fair play mysteries, but I’m not expert enough to know how fair they play. And there are individual books that deliberately swim in those waters. I’ve read two redoings of “And Then There Were None” that are obvious homages. They’re just gimmicks today, so artificial that the only pleasure is comparing them to the original rather than something new that others would imitate.
Nobody writes 1930s science fiction any more, except as homage or pastiche. Why would they write 1930s mysteries, especially the kind that required 25-50 pages of exposition at the end? Television shows can do them in 50 minutes. Death in Paradise offers an impossible crime every episode. The answer comes in a few lines of dialog. That’s modern life for you.
I enjoy John Dickson Carr-style locked-room mysteries, and I do like other classic mysteries where the clues are there for you, but…I also recognize those are much harder to write, and I’m okay with a mystery where the clues aren’t precisely there as long as I’m discovering things along with the characters & at least have enough info to make some uninformed guesses.
I wonder how much of this is due to the death (or at least the dearth) of the market for popular short stories. Even short novels (like, under 200 pages) seem to have fallen out of favor nowadays. IMHO fair play mysteries are more fun at shorter lengths.
Then again, I wonder how much of the decline of the fair-play mystery is due to all of the really good ideas having been used up.
All the big, spectacular ideas were probably used before the war. And impossible crimes have only a few plausible answers. Death in Paradise reuses solutions so often that viewers probably know the answer without bothering to figure out who and exactly how.
But short story master Edward Hoch wrote over 100 impossible crimes solved by Dr. Sam Hawthorne of the most murder-plagued small town in Connecticut. They’re collected in a half-dozen books and don’t seem overly repetitive even when read together.
Hiding a murderer is not the same as making the crime mysterious. Even the hardboiled private eye genre started with surprise endings, as in Hammett and Chandler.
The real problem is that the genre depended on disposable victims. The original death might have been someone who deserved it, but the form required a second or third murder of people who knew too much. Authors had to write about cardboard humans to justify knocking off a whole family just to stretch the plot to the right length. It was the demand after the war to make deaths meaningful that really killed the fair play mystery.
Just a footnote: Fr. Ronald Knox, in the 1920s classic era, famously produced a (slightly) tongue-in-cheek set of rules:
https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/tips-masters/ronald-knox-10-commandments-of-detective-fiction
Also available, with a couple of annotations, at TvTropes’s “Fair-Play Whodunit” page.
Conan Doyle did this with some of the Holmes stories. He used words or sentences that had a double meaning, but you are led all along to believe that it is Meaning X, when in fact, only in hindsight, can you see that it meant Meaning Y.
Example: The Valley of Fear. When a letter arrived in the valley, informing the criminal gang that there was a Pinkerton detective spying on them, the main character, McMurdo, “was quiet for a while, having seen an abyss open in front of him.” (paraphrased.) Since McMurdo is one of the most prominent criminal leaders, the reader naturally assumes this means that McMurdo is afraid of the threat that the Pinkerton detective poses to the gang. But only later on, when it is revealed that McMurdo is the Pinkerton detective himself, does the reader realize that “the abyss” meant McMurdo’s fear of his cover being blown and him being captured by his fellow crooks.