Shows like Jonathan Creek, Death in Paradise, Monk, Psych and the better episodes of Poirot/Marple make a habit of providing the viewer with** all ** the information needed to solve the crime, (and especially give you a particular moment where the show is telling you “you should have solved it by now, we’re now going to start the reveal”, the solve is not going to rely on some info the detective had access to but we didn’t.
However most detective shows aren’t like that, bringing in extraneous evidence that the viewer never had the chance to see. Anybody got any good recommendations about mystery shows that make a habit of always showing you all relevant evidence before the final reveal?
This possibly could be the worst answer ever, but how about Columbo?
Yeah it’s back to front, you know whodunnit, and howdunnit, but it’s still a puzzle in a sense, as you’re trying to work out what’s not perfect about the crime, and put yourself in Columbo’s shoes.
My recollection is that they gave you enough info to play junior-Columbo (it wouldn’t surprise me if there are an exception or two to this though).
Columbo is an interesting case, because (a) yes, some of the episodes show you someone committing what looks like the perfect crime while you can in fact see the key piece of evidence our hero will later discover; but (b) maybe half of the episodes show you what looks like the perfect crime, followed by the detective throwing up his hands and saying well, since this time there in fact is no key piece of evidence, I’ll just plant a little fake evidence or something and watch the guilty party incriminate himself.
There was an old '70s series Ellery Queen (based on the novel series) that not only did this, the main character specifically turns to the camera at the end and says “OK, you have all the clues you need to solve the mystery. Do you know who did it?”
I was going to mention Ellergy Queen, too. They were following the early books, which had a “Challenge to the Reader,” telling them they had the clues they needed.
The various Agatha Christie adaptations did this; Christie always gave all the clues. Indeed, since the 1920s (at least), it’s considered poor writing if all the clues aren’t shown to the reader beforehand. Indeed, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Christie went to great lengths to point out the clues that the reader had missed to show she was playing fair.
Perry Mason also showed all the clues. The next-to-last person on the stand would say something that would cause Perry to find the killer. Viewers would see everything that Perry did.
I suspect that nearly all mystery shows on TV follow this rule and don’t come to the solution without showing all the clues beforehand.
I haven’t seen a Perry Mason for a long time, and didn’t see many episodes, but it sticks in my mind as the complete opposite, in that (as I recall), Perry would always introduce a brand new piece of evidence that the audience hadn’t perused.
Again YMMV but most detective shows I see end up being unsolvable by the detective until fortune intervenes at the end or solvable by the detective, but using evidence the viewer didn’t see.
In the original series there was often a quick reaction shot of someone in the courtroom providing a clue, but just as often that would be a red herring. It’s all guesswork, rarely does a show offer enough evidence to draw a conclusion, just some possibilities.
I only saw a couple of episodes of Murder, She Wrote, but IIRC it was exactly what you’re looking for. And there’s like 8000 episodes, I think.
I saw even less of Matlock, but it was basically a Perry Mason template, with a dramatic reveal at the end, with the viewer only privy to what Matlock knew.
I bet Diagnosis, Murder was another one that let you try to figure it out as Dick van Dyke did, but I base that upon it being another old actor in a mystery show in the 90’s.
All good mysteries are written this way. It’s tough, which is why the so called “mystery” section in modern bookstores is almost all crime books. Lazy writers.
One thing that I like about the new version of “Sherlock” is the addition of the “Sherlock Scan”, which adds the benefit of not only the obvious clues in a scene, but even some of the inferred clues that the detective has picked up on but neglected to mention.
My favorite mystery show of recent years was “A Nero Wolfe Mystery” from A&E. Maury Chaykin as Wolfe, and Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin. The thing that makes Wolfe unique is the strange combination of piecing together the clues and motives, and the frequent use of a “Batman Gambit” to catch the murderer. Brilliant stuff.
No. The evidence was usually revealed by Perry cross-examining someone on the stand. Something he or she said would be the final piece of the puzzle, and always tied in with something established before, usually contradicting it. Often the bit of evidence is established early in the program, so the viewer might overlook it.
I seriously doubt “most” detective shows did this, and I’d be surprised if you could come up with any specific examples. The idea that a mystery story not include all the relevant facts for the reader/viewer has been scorned since the 1920s, at least. It’s worse than ending a story with “He woke up and discovered it was all a dream.”
You have to pay attention, but any mystery story written since 1930 – as well as any dramatization – had all the clues there. They boil down to the final clue that puts all the pieces together, but that clue always connects to what has already been established and is meaningless without it.
Now you may be thinking of detective shows, not mystery shows. There is a difference and some detective shows may have done this on occasion.
The early books made a fetish of giving all the information. Not only did they (two guys wrote as a team) have the Challenge to the Reader, but some of them had the pages after the Challenge sealed in paper so that you couldn’t cheat and check the ending. (Finding an unsealed first is the collector’s grail.) In the 1940s they had a radio show that had the gimmick that the after the set up the actors paused while a group of panelists tried to work out the ending before the show finished. They were rather a nut on the subject.
Queen started writing in 1929, when “playing fair” began to be important. The previous year, S. S. van Dine, who wrote the Philo Vance mysteries published "Twenty rules for writing detective stories"of which number one was:
Fair play mystery is really hard, which is why most tv shows aren’t as completely rigorous as books, which could devote dozens of pages to slowly working through the puzzle.