A lot of the murders on Death in Paradise are rather ridiculous. One that jumps out at me was a killer who disguised herself as herself in order to convince the detectives that someone else was the killer and trying to frame her.
There was an old mystery novel I read once called The Old Contemptibles. It had a few unlikely developments, but the one I remember was that some landscape painter depicted the murderer hiding in the bushes at the scene of the crime in his (or was it her?) artwork.
Excuse me, whaaat? That’s not going to stand up in court. It’s a painting for god’s sake. NOT a photograph. And the artist didn’t even realize the killer was there? He/she just painted what he/she saw. Umm, yeah, riiiight.
Yep. Lampshaded and a better solution by Lord Darcy in “(Murder on) the Napoli Express.” By Randall Garrett, the very best fantasy detective series.
And featuring some of the worst puns imaginable
Trying to go back from the reveal in Orient Express and tracing the exact movements of the murderers and how Poirot could have missed them all while they were happening will boil your brain like reading through an entire Trump speech.
Perhaps the only worse experience would be sitting through the Kenneth Branagh movie version starring the worst fake mustache in movie history since the Keystone Kops.
You’re misremembering; the killer was actually setting up a dummy to act as an automated tennis partner, and the victim wrapping the rope around his own neck was part of planning its creation.
For some reason, I’m now reminded of the Fly Me If You Can Find Me episode of Banacek: in which a guy was murdered because, well…
…spoilers…
“Walt’s body could help add to the illusion. Gilbert most likely did the shooting; they moved Walt’s body to the real airport, and placed it on the runway where it’d be found the next morning, along with scraps of rubber from the plane’s tires — and, of course, a soft-drink bottle.”
As you can Of Course gather from the above, the plan was to slap together a fake airport — complete with a working telephone inside the impromptu building filled with “almost exact duplicates” of the actual furniture — making sure to set up a stocked vending machine, so a guy could even buy a drink after “the DC-8 landed in the middle of what was actually an illusion: created with lights, signs, an access road cleared of sand, and a silhouette ‘cutout’ of a hangar.”
Because: then you can steal the plane from the fake airport, while everyone who thinks it’s already been stolen is looking for clues at the real airport…
Yeah, that is why I like Lord Darcy’s take. But the film was beautiful to watch. Same thing with Death on the Nile- a beautiful film.
I am a gigantic fan of John Dickson Carr. I once owned every book he wrote (just as readers, not collectibles) and when I culled my mystery holdings by 90% I kept his Fell and Merrivale books.
Wire Cage has the worst solution of any of his books. If you take it apart you have to come to the conclusion that the victim voluntarily committed suicide. Who would follow those orders without asking if the other had lost their mind?
The rope was tied across the tennis court from the killer. After giving the murderer one end of the rope, said murderer asked the victim to stand in the middle and put the rope around his neck to get a neck size for building a dummy. Like any man from that era wouldn’t have known his exact neck size, or asked why the exact size was needed, or wondered how he was supposed to determine the exact size even after unwrapping the rope while holding a foot or so of it in the middle of a tennis court without any way of taking a measure. Don’t even ask how the killer got a rope tightly embedded into a victim’s neck off without leaving a mark on the court.
In case you’re wondering how this could get worse… A second murder is necessary to pad out the length - virtually all Golden Age mysteries have one or even two or three - but it’s the second murder that even the people who wave their hands at the tennis court murder find to be ridiculous.
To guote the man himself:
“I heartily admit that the second murder…was not only bad, but unethical and lousy…I had to lug in more gore in order to get the proper length.”
You know, I’m guessing that’s the murder mystery that Olivier is riffing on at the beginning of SLEUTH…
Honorable mention- impossible coincidences in The Rookie- just this last epi, the attack on Tim & Chen could only happen is they knew where they were gonna be- which is impossible. (Then a trap was set by the super intelligent 
serial killer for Bailey, but any of five or more firefighters could have set it off, then the set up for Chen by that other serial killer…)…
I think you’re a little off in your analysis here. The accomplice isn’t doing the itinerant barber gig just to get hold of a cutthroat razor, it’s mostly to give himself a deep cover for being in the neighborhood at the same time as his co-conspirator, as it would be suspicious if they were both known to be there in propria persona.
And the whole Romanov fantasy wasn’t just to lure the victim to a particular spot, but to muddy up the motivation for killing him by giving him this “secret life” business and the whole melodrama of supposed suicide. Remember how awkwardly obvious the real murder motive would have been if the conspirators hadn’t scattered their red herrings around.
I don’t think so. If it was there to muddy up the waters they would have publicized it. But instead they hid it behind codes. The police investigation wouldn’t have even known about it without Wimsey’s intervention and code breaking. And another problem is that Wimsey would never have even known about “Bright” if he hadn’t answered the advert.
I started reading the book series about the girls with the dragon tattoo. In one of the later ones she gets shot and buried and then somehow re- appears later in the book having dug herself out. I put the book down and gave it away. No more of that crap. Then there was one of the Dan brown books where there was this giant powerful secret the searcher spent 400 pages chasing only to find out that:..“iT” (the Maguffin) was the king James bible ferkrissake. I went back to non - fiction.
I love Banacek, but at least half of the thefts couldn’t work. This being a big one.
Once Banacek (or anyone) got a plane up in the air, it’s going to be obvious.You can’t hide tracks in the desert. And changing DC-8 tires is not easy, and you can’t bring them in in a pickup truck.
That can be applied in a more general fashion to a LOT of perps in these kinds of stories. They would of course know that they are guilty–so why are they just casually playing along with the detective/cop in question? What do they have to gain? Why not just bugger off to Tahiti using a fake passport (give all of the faked crap in this thread that the perps have engineered, something like that would seem trivial by comparison), and let the authorities twist in the wind?
[Yeah, I know why–we wouldn’t have a story…]
Lately I feel like I’ve seen a lot of British mysteries where the perp turns an accident into a murder for no logical reason.
“We got into a fight and when I pushed him back, he fell, hit his head, and died. So I faked his death and then had to kill three more people to cover it up.”
Then you should be sure to watch Branagh’s Death on the Nile, which gives us the mustache’s origin story!
Wasn’t it also to “play fair” with the reader by introducing, even if only by association, the concept of the medical condition known to afflict the real-life Czarevitch?
Even worse are the stories in which they’re the one to bring in the detective in the first place, presumably to make them seem innocent. Nobody ever says that they also must have thought the detective was an idiot.
I did see it. The horror, the horror!
Somehow I had missed the last few Lord Darcy stories, so I went back and read that one. Skewers Christie through the heart. Garrett was an excellent parodist. Two collections of his sf parodies exist, Takeoff! and Takeoff, Too!
An earlier story, “The Ipswitch Files,” stunned me by having the exact same set-up as the Carr Wire Cage novel I savaged above. A person is found on a beach, a bullet through his brain fired by his own gun. The sand is untouched all around him except for the footprints of the finder, which stop several feet away from the body. Witnesses arrive a few minutes later and confirm the tale, although Darcy doesn’t get there for a week. The solution? Damned if I know. The one in the story is so full of holes that Carr himself might have been writing it.