# The butler did it! **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 24, 2018, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-butler-did-it/809482 "2018-02-24T18:32:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Lucas\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucas_jackson/32/303_2.png) [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2018, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-butler-did-it/809482/1 "2018-02-24T18:32:55Z")
What the origin of this trope? Charlie Chan maybe? Suggestions… ---
**Author:** ![Anamorphic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/anamorphic/32/3057_2.png) [@Anamorphic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anamorphic)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2018, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-butler-did-it/809482/2 "2018-02-24T18:36:01Z")
Straight from the Straight Dope: > **[In whodunits, “the butler did it.” Who did it first?](https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2470/in-whodunits-its-the-butler-did-it-who-did-it-first/)** ---
**Author:** ![Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/prof.pepperwinkle/32/13627_2.png) [@Prof.Pepperwinkle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Prof.Pepperwinkle)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2018, 6:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-butler-did-it/809482/3 "2018-02-24T18:36:13Z")
Here’s Mental Floss’s take on it: [Why Do We Say "The Butler Did It"? | Mental Floss](http://mentalfloss.com/article/50679/why-do-we-say-butler-did-it). > [@](#): > > Two of the earliest examples of felonious butlers I can find are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Musgrave Ritual” from 1893 and Herbert Jenkins’ “The Strange Case of Mr. Challoner” from 1921. Conan Doyle’s butler isn’t the primary villain of the story, but does attempt to rob his employers and winds up dead for it. Jenkins made his butler the main bad guy and the murderer in the story. As far as I can tell, he was the first to do so, but it was another author, Mary Roberts Rinehart, who made it a detective story trope. > > Rinehart was a successful and prolific author and playwright, sometimes regarded as the “American Agatha Christie.” One of her plays, The Bat, focused on a group of people being murdered one by one by the titular costumed killer, a character that helped inspired Bob Kane’s Batman. > > In Rinehart’s 1930 novel The Door, the butler is the murderer, and while the novel is sometimes cited as the first appearance of the phrase “the butler did it,” it doesn’t appear in that book or any of her other works. While The Door was a hit for Rinehart and her sons, who released it through a publishing house they’d just started up, her pinning the crime on the butler has gone down in history as a serious misstep. Just two years earlier, critic and detective novelist SS Van Dine laid down a set of rules for crime and mystery writers in an essay fittingly titled “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” Among his advice was, “A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person—one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.” ---
**Author:** ![Lucas\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucas_jackson/32/303_2.png) [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2018, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-butler-did-it/809482/4 "2018-02-24T18:43:29Z")
Thanks. And I did do a search. As usual my google-fu sucks. ---
**Author:** ![burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/burpo_the_wonder_mutt/32/365_2.png) [@burpo\_the\_wonder\_mutt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/burpo_the_wonder_mutt)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2018, 6:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-butler-did-it/809482/5 "2018-02-24T18:48:34Z")
^ Should’ve had the butler do it. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![buddha\_david](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2018, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-butler-did-it/809482/6 "2018-02-24T19:02:26Z")
Did you hear about the rich guy who died from drinking poisoned wine? It turns out the bottler did it. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2018, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-butler-did-it/809482/7 "2018-02-24T20:09:17Z")
A couple of older threads on the subject. [Was it always the butler? (Detective novel cliché)](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=159465) [The butler did it.](https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=368638) I still haven’t come across anything more definitive than saying it emerged from forgotten 1920s British novels. Notice that Cecil’s thread came after the first one and he, um, borrowed from that earlier thread. But not as blatantly as that Mental Floss writer ripped off Cecil’s column. That’s bordering on plagiarism. ---
**Author:** ![furryman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/furryman/32/99_2.png) [@furryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furryman)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2018, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-butler-did-it/809482/8 "2018-02-25T19:56:05Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#): > > Did you hear about the rich guy who died from drinking poisoned wine? It turns out the bottler did it. “He died from too much cholesterol.” “The butter did it.” ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [February 26, 2018, 12:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-butler-did-it/809482/9 "2018-02-26T00:50:20Z")
In _Frankenstein_, Mary Shelly has a servant girl take the fall for the murder of Frankenstein’s little brother. Maybe she saw a Teutonic tendency for the nobility to distrust the working class and extrapolated from there. ---
**Author:** ![bibliophage](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bibliophage/32/7615_2.png) [@bibliophage](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bibliophage)\ **Post date:** [February 26, 2018, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-butler-did-it/809482/10 "2018-02-26T02:32:34Z")
> [@SS Van Dine](#): > > A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person—one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion. The implication being that a servant couldn’t possibly be a worth-while person. I hope Mr. Van Dine is in hell now suffering under the withering gaze of Mervyn Bunter. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [February 26, 2018, 4:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-butler-did-it/809482/11 "2018-02-26T04:16:46Z")
> [@bibliophage](#): > > The implication being that a servant couldn’t possibly be a worth-while person. I hope Mr. Van Dine is in hell now suffering under the withering gaze of Mervyn Bunter. I get what you’re saying. But Bunter is \*not \*a worth-while person, because we never meet him as a _person_. And that’s true for Albert Campion’s Magersfontein Lugg and Hercule Poirot’s Captain Hastings and most of the other classic mystery sidekicks. For that matter, neither is S. S. van Dine, who was the supposed sidekick and narrator of the Philo Vance mysteries. They are not there to be persons, and giving them character would take away from the time needed to make the suspects worth suspecting. Same with servants. Of course they could have reasons for wanting to kill the second Viscount, but none that would play into a novel of deduction. Their lives were kept so strictly separated that the necessary connectedness of the suspects could never be applied to them with any believability. The structures of classic fair-play mysteries may have been artificial but those class barriers were totally real. Might as well write a baseball novel that is won by the kicker making a field goal. Every reader would call that a cheat, but it’s not a reflection on the worth of football players.