Have you ever solved a mystery, whether in a book, film, short story, whatever, before the detective (in whatever form) did? And by solve, I mean that you were able to pick up on clues that logically lead to the solution, not that there are only five suspects and you were able to choose one of them, based on intuition or the style of the author.
The only one that I remember solving was a Nero Wolfe mystery, where some woman said something in an offhand manner that she wouldn’t have been able to know unless she was the murderer. Wolfe used the same evidence to accuse her (although he had Saul silently determine the motive). Don’t remember which one it was though.
Of course, there are several styles of mysteries, as you can find out by watching Murder By Death, and not all of them give you enough information to solve the case
Agatha Christie had a mystery written late in her career where she put in a very obvious clue so I figured out the mystery. But that was her mistake rather than my astuteness. (can’t remember the plot at all, just the clue and part of the ending)
Also I figured out The Jagged Edge, but I was not really even thinking at the time that I wasn’t meant to figure out the Jagged Edge (though there are apparently those who did not).
I can’t produce a cite (or a set of them) but it’s gotten to be a regular thing in any movie that features a “mystery” (whether as a main plot device or just part of the way the thing is presented) that either the thing will telegraph itself so poorly or just because I’ve seen so many of the damn things, that I’ll have it figured out well before all the clues come in.
That has less to do with any major solving skills and more to do with having a large catalog of such things in my head. There’s only x-number of ways a movie’s plot can unravel, and most of the good ones have already been used.
It takes a real jewel (like 1 in 100) to beat that pattern. Now and then one will and I rejoice at not having figured it out. But the other 99 times it’s “I told you so.”
More often than not I have quit judging a movie on how well it disquises the “mystery” and more on how well the “mystery” hold up on a second (or multiple) reviewing.
The last one that had me all in knots was The Usual Suspects and I’m still not sure all the pieces fit together right.
TV show “mysteries” are generally insanely easy to solve once you learn the Law of Redundant Characters. Books can be stuffed with all sorts of extra minor characters to throw you off the trail, but generally a TV show has just the bare number of characters needed to advance the plot. If there’s an extra character in a show who seems to serve no dramatic function, chances are They Did It. (Or, if the show is a little more sophisticated, the redundant character is the designated Red Herring. In any case, the number of characters is so small it’s usually easy to figure out what’s going on.)
I don’t know if it really counts as a mystery, but I figured out the accident in Michael Crichton’s Airframe occured halfway through the book.
spoiler
“None of the tests show anything mechanically wrong with the plane.”
“Then it must be pilot error.”
“Idiot! With Captain Lee at the controls, this couldn’t be pilot error!”
Well, then, if the first and third statements are true, and yet the accident still happened, then logically the only option is for Captain Lee to not have been at the controls. Add to this the fact that you found a pilot’s hat at the back of the plane and I think you can call this one solved, eh Einstein?
[/spoiler]
I’ve done it off and on with some short stories, and a few comic books (love the Maze Agency - why can’t I find my back issues and their brief run at their third publisher?). There are some where I came DAMN close, but failed to make the next step to fully grasp the implications of what I’d managed to figure out.
And there are the times where I fell face-first into the carefully laid out false solution. Damn you, Ellery Queen!
I’m not a big mystery fan, but I was able to solve some of the Sherlock Holmes stories. (I don’t remember specifically which ones, though.) Sometimes when I didn’t, it would be because I had actually figured it out, but then rejected the right answer as being too outlandish. I’ve seen two Agatha Christie movies, and I solved one and had no hope of solving the other. The one I solved was a high-concept mystery, whereas the other was a figure-out-every-logistical-detail-of-the-murder mystery.
I’ll second the statement that TV and movie mysteries are typically transparently obvious or utterly impossible. In fact, I feel that most mystery movies aren’t meant to be solved, but are meant to present an illusion of solvability. Someone (I think Pauline Kael) joked about the “Esterhas binary method” by which anyone watching a Joe Esterhas movie, no matter how stupid they are, has the exact same 50% chance of figuring it out as anyone else does. No Esterhas movie can be solved, because he throws in an equal number of clues damning each of the two suspects. When the murderer is unmasked, there’s no need to create a plausible explanation for all the clues pointing to the innocent person, because all the clues were either circumstantial or irrelevant, or both. I mean, come on- a typical Esterhas clue is “she likes anal sex- she must be a murderess!”
I really don’t see a lot of mystery movies anymore. The last one that I saw that could truely consider a mystery was The Zero Effect. Mysteries don’t make money at the box office; it needs to be a thriller or an action-packed adventure.
For the most part, I would agree about the difficulties with TV mysteries. Shows like CSI are more about the process than who dunnit. Columbo was more about the interaction between the hunter and the prey. I do think that Monk trancends many of the flaws of the TV genre, though. I was pretty impressed with the suicide off the tower episode.
Grousser–I remember figuring that one out. Or at least, I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, it would be cool if HE did it.” And he did. Case closed.
In Monk (the episode where he goes to Mexico), I sort of solved it…
It was unsolvable, technically, because it involved a character that we didn’t even know about. But the point was that the autopsy doctor (pathologist?) did it because how else could someone die from drowning by jumping out of a plane? After they mentioned that the previous year, someone had been found dead of a lion mauling, but with no lions in the area, I thought maybe the pathologist is screwing around for some reason. So then I thought, “Naah, it’s gotta be cooller than that.” But it wasn’t.
One of these days, the butler will do it, and then I’ll get my comeuppance.
I disagree. I don’t think the writers intended for the viewer to have to know about the motive, which is the only important part of the backstory. All that’s required of you, I think, is to know who, even if you don’t know why. Although once you figured out that the coroner was lying about never having been to the States, it’s not too hard to guess that his motive might have been Monk in particular, even if you don’t know the details.
I did manage to get one of Ellery Queen’s challenges to the reader (in Queen’s early novels, he stop at one point would tell you that you now had all the clues to solve the mystery). I think it was “The French Powder Mystery” or “The Dutch Shoe Mystery,” but it’s been awhile so I don’t recall which.
BTW, Queen’s “The Chinese Orange Mystery” probably couldn’t be guessed nowadays since social changes has made one of the key clues meaningless.
On TV, Monk is easy to solve, but the show isn’t about the mystery anyway; it’s about Monk.
Here’s a couple of laws from Roger Eberts Glossary of Movie Terms that will help you crack any TV or movie mystery:
"Law of Economy of Characters
Movie budgets make it impossible for any film to contain unnecessary characters. Therefore, all characters in a movie are necessary to the story—even those who do not seem to be. Sophisticated viewers can use this Law to deduce the identity of a person being kept secret by the movie’s plot: This “mystery” person is always the only character in the movie who seems otherwise extraneous. Cf. the friendly neighbor in THE WOMAN IN WHITE. (See also Unmotivated Closeup)…"
"Unmotivated Close-up
A character is given a close-up in a scene where there seems to be no reason for it. This is an infallible tip-off that this character is more significant than at first appears, and is most likely the killer. See the lingering close-up of the undercover KGB agent near the beginning of THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER."
My husband has an uncanny ability to solve CSI almost every week. I frankly can’t - I can’t reason the way he does - wonder if it’s a man/woman kind of thing - the way things like mysteries are “reasoned out” or “worked out”…
