I’ve been reading Sherlock Holmes adventures online, and while they make for good popcorn reading, they seem to have the same failing as other dime-a-dozen mysteries. Readers do not have enough clues to solve the mysteries themselves. The stories usually end when Holmes calls in the actual perpetrator, and he confesses the tangled, sordid details of his weird life and how it led to him committing the crime.
For example, The Boscombe Valley Mystery. A young man is thought to have murdered his father. The actual murderer turns out to be the neighbor who’s bedridden and dying of disease. It turns out the neighbor was a coach robber in Australia when he was young, and he had robbed the victim back then. Years later, the victim spotted him in England after he had turned over a new leaf and blackmailed him that he’ll expose his past unless he lets him and his daughter live on his land rent free. The only indication Holmes had that the murderer had been to Australia was that the victim was heard to have shouted “Coo-eee,” which only people from Australia do. What?
There’s too many assertions that people of a certain type always do this action. In A Scandal in Bohemia, Holmes fakes a fire because he knew that the suspect, a woman who’s blackmailing the King of Germany with a photo of the two of them together, would instinctively run to protect the thing she loves most. Usually it’s a baby or cherished piece of jewelry, but in this case it was the photo she had hidden in another room. What if she just ran out of the building instead?
So are there any detective stories that provide enough clues for the reader to figure out on his own? Something that doesn’t involve the writer pulling something out his ass in the final scene?
It sounds like you’re looking for is Fair Play Whodunits–that is, stories which provide all the required clues to reach the correct conclusion within the story, among other rules. That TVTropes link includes lists of examples, but beware spoilers.
We also had a recent thread on “cozy” mysteries that fit the trope.
Unfortunately, that was a common belief in British society when the stories were written. They are a product of their times.
I haven’t read them in a while, but I seem to remember that several of the scenes in which Holmes amazed Watson with his deductions about a complete stranger included things like, “I could tell from the slope of his forehead he is an intellectual.” Totally bogus now, but unremarkable then.
But yeah, the kind of thing you’re talking about is a whole subgenre. Google “Fair Play Mystery” or “Fair Play Whodunit” for details. And, FWIW, when I did so, I ran across a site claiming that “The Red-Headed League” and some other Sherlock Holmes stories are among the earliest examples (link, which includes spoilers for the story in question, here).
The Holmes legend overrides all reality and sense. Doyle was a gifted wordsmith, but a hack in almost every other way. He wrote down, according to his standards, in grinding out those silly Holmes stories that he came to hate. He was sure that his other works would bring him lasting fame.
As a result, he took no time or effort to properly research his stories, study his locations, check any of his facts, or even reread the first half of the stories when it came time to finish then. “The Red-Headed League” is famed for this and is possibly the worst example of a fair-play mystery anyone could reference - the time element is utterly insane, e.g. - but you could point to any story at random and pick it apart.
Fair Play mysteries were a later development. They were more or less codified by the best authors in the 1920s, but they were a dead end as well. Some books needed nearly 100 pages to explicate every detail given in the first 300. As Manfred Lee, half of Ellery Queen, once wrote, “our books are only fair is the reader is a genius.” In Doyle’s day, just coming up with a suitable mystery was deemed sufficient. Whether even the most detailed explanations are truly fair and complete is arguable, though.
Most of them, in my experience, although I’m not a huge mystery buff. With a few exceptions, Agatha Christie left the reader enough clues that by the end you could at least feel like it was possible to have guessed who the killer was – and sometimes I was able to guess upon first reading.
One of the exceptions is The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), where the reader isn’t really given any clues pointing to the killer, but this was apparently considered both unusual and disappointing at the time because contemporary reviews of the novel criticized Christie for not playing fair with the reader.
Most Ellery Queen stories and all Encyclopedia Brown stories provide one or two clues blatant enough to give everything away if the reader is sharp enough to see it.
Otherwise, even the best whodunits rarely make it that easy on the reader.
Most common reader clue has to be the “Alas, my brother, struck down in a hail of bullets before his time!” one…“I never told him his brother had been shot.”
I don’t recall the mystery in question, but I remember a snippet of clue dialogue I particularly liked. The detective(?) was chatting casually about the victim with someone who was not in a position to know the victim was dead, and the conversation took this turn:
“But we’ve been doing something worse since I first mentioned him.”
“What’s that?”
“Speaking of him in the past tense.”
Actually, there’s more than just the “Coo-ee” cry – Holmes picked up on the reference to “Ballarat” as well.
As for “A Scandal in Bohemia”, I don’t see your problem – Holmes didn’t require that Irene Adler would invariably rescue the photo first – it was the way he’d hoped to flush it out. If that didn’t work, he’d have tried something else. (But he had a sympathetic author, of course, so it did work.)
Holmes does rely upon people reacting in particular ways, or upon things being predictable – more than once he’s gathered that a man had a military background from the way he carried himself (He did that with Watson, for instance). world isn’t quite so reguilar or predictable, at least not today, and more than one mystery author has at least jostled the spirit of Doyle and Hoilmes about it. (“Should I be trying to find out what kind of cigar leaves that kind of ash?” Archie Goodwin once playfully asked Nero Wolfe, recalling Holmes’ claimed ability to identify cigars from their ash.)
But Doyle usually DID “play fair”. The reader can solve the mysteries (or at least most of the mysteries) of The Man With the Twisted Lip from the clues in the story, and the essential points of Silver Blaze. Exapno takes shots at The Red-Headed League, but Doyle gives you the necessary bits in there, aside from John Clay’s identity and what the actual state of his trouser knees were (although the reader can extrapolate). The reader can’t pace out the room in The Norwood Builder, but he knows about the cavalier way the will was treated and that the fingerprint was added after the supposed death of the Builder.
I have to disagree with Exapno about Doyle being “a hack in every other way”. It’s not Doyle’s mere skill with shoving a verb against a nounj that makes people still read his works after all this time, nor is it a requirement for high school courses. It’s not even merely the quirky relationship between Holmes and WAtson. The Naval Treaty depends upon Holmes reasoning from the non-appearance of the treaty all the time that his client has been indisposed – and draws a different conclusion than everyone else.
The stories aren’t all perfect (The CReeping Man still makes me cringe), and Doyle DID fail to recall details about his cases and characters – like having Watson’s wife calling him by the wrong first name, or changing the name of the Housekeeper at Baker Street, or giving completely different names or descriptions to prior cases when recalled in other stories – in a way that shows he wasn’t terribly concerned about them, but I think his batting average is still pretty good. In “Murder by Death”, Neil Simon accused mystery writers of hiding salient information from the readers, which made them truly angry. I notice that he didn’t include a Sherlock Holmes stand-in among them.