Encyclopedia Browned - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Encyclopedia Brown? What a hack! To this day, I occasionally reach into my left pocket for my keys with my right hand, just to prove that little brat wrong."

—ericbop, MetaFilter

A guy's alibi is that his mule was pregnant, and he is immediately revealed to be lying, since mules can't get pregnant.

But wait! There's a problem with this "revelation". Female mules can be fertile; it's rare, but it happens. This "revelation" is simply wrong.

This is a specific kind of Did Not Do The Research, related to Dan Browned, where a pivotal clue in solving a case is actually erroneous. This is related to Bugs Meany Is Gonna Walk, but goes further: Encyclopedia Brown needs to check his encyclopedia, because he's factually incorrect.

Examples

Literature

The "mule" clue was used in "The Case of Molly's Mule" from Two Minute Mysteries, by the same author as the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries, but with an older demographic.
- For what it's worth, the Encyclopedia Brown story would've still worked, had the Kid Detective only pointed out the incongruity of a modern-day prospector traveling with a mule in the first place. (Looks like Bugs Meany watches too many Wild West movies.) "The Case of Molly's Mule" does not.
- Another Two Minute Mystery had a deaf witness testifying that he read the suspect's lips and took special note of it because the suspect was whispering, which is suspicious. His testimony is questioned, because he shouldn't have been able to tell the suspect was whispering. However, whispering is simply a different way of speaking, having nothing to do with volume, and looks different to a lip-reader.
- Yet another had a photograph entered in a contest. The picture was of a little girl lighting a candle, with a woman falling past the window behind her. The woman had been on the roof when she was blown off by heavy winds. There is no question as to the veracity of the woman falling off the roof; this mystery is solely about the photograph. The photo was ruled a fake, because if the window had been open, the candle could not have been lit due to the heavy winds, and if the window had been closed the flash's reflection would have obscured the falling body. This disregards the fact that, if the woman was being blown past the window, the wind was clearly not going into it.
  - That's completely ignoring the Bernoulli principle. Powerful wind flowing past an open window should affect the air pressure in the room. Otherwise airplanes, helicopters, bird, insects, and so on would be unable to fly: they're all dependent on pressure differentials caused by differences in air speeds above and below the wings or blades in question.
- Sometimes, Detective Haledjian completely disregards sheer stupidity as an answer. In one mystery, he was on his way to a BBQ when the host was found murdered. His neighbor came over, saying he heard his wife scream in horror, and during the interrogation, spotted the wife's pearl earring in the grill and reached his hand in to retrieve it. The detective told him that he obviously planted the earring because, despite having just arrived, he knew that the coals were cool enough to plunge his hand into them. Apart from the fact that coal visibly whitens when heated and that people can sense heat when standing next to hot coals, does he ever consider the fact that the guy could have just been an idiot?
- Yet another had a detective asking for bicarbonate of soda for an upset stomach while in a bakery that produces only fruit pies. The baker says she doesn't have any in stock; this leads the detective to deduce that the bakery must be a front for smuggling, since bicarbonate of soda is baking soda and no real bakery would be without it. But fruit pies don't contain baking soda! It's used only in raised-dough products that contain acid, such as buttermilk biscuits - not pie crust (either variety).
  - Which crosses over with Bugs Meany Is Gonna Walk, because it's entirely possible the woman didn't know the scientific name for the substance. Or was just being unhelpful because she didn't like him.
- Mrs Sydney tries to stump Haledjian by giving him the following puzzle: A childhood friend of hers, before his death, gave his housekeeper an envelope containing his money and deeds and such, with the instruction that she was to give it to his only remaining relative, his brother. But she had never met the brother and the only clues she had to his location and looks were a photo taken when both boys were ten, over fifty years ago, and a letter sent from another town. The housekeeper went to the town and asked for the brother, and the next day was met by a hundred men claiming to be the brother. Mrs. Sydney tells Haledjian that the housekeeper could tell who the brother was instantly and asks him how she knew. Haledjian says that since the photo was taken when both boys were ten, they must have been twins. But not all twins are identical, even if they are of the same gender. Since pregnancies last less than a year it's also possible that the boys simply happen to be close enough in age to be 10 at the same time despite being born on different dates. To be fair on Haledjian, in this case he knew the housekeeper had managed to identify the brother, which she couldn't have done if the picture hadn't been evidence they were identical twins.
One from Encyclopedia Brown: The culprit's alibi was that, when he walked past the victim's house, he heard the electric clock (which was unplugged when the crime was committed) ticking, the contradiction being that electric clocks don't tick. For the sake of expediency, we'll ignore questions like "how loud would it have to be ticking to be audible outside the house?" and "exactly how is this an alibi anyway?" and skip straight to the fact that some electric clocks do make artificial ticking sounds.
- Another Encyclopedia Brown case featured a perp who pretended his pig was kidnapped and said the kidnapper gave him a number where he could contact him to get the pig back. Encyclopedia immediately spots a hole in the perp's story because telephones don't have the letter "Z" on their dials. Originally, this was just Bugs Meany Is Gonna Walk, but now that some modern phones do have the letter Z on their ~~dials~~ keypads, it becomes Encyclopedia Browned. The keyword being "modern." In this case, it's Technology Marches On.
- A client's entry in an art show is damaged by one of the three friends he had over at his house. Encyclopedia identifies the culprit as the one who went into the kitchen a dictionary to look up the meaning of the word "misled" and claimed it was the past participle of 'misle' instead of "mislead". In fact, "misled" is past participle of both.
- And another example from Encyclopedia Brown: The perp claimed that he was awoken by the sound of thunder and after stumbling to his window saw the crime in a flash of lightning. Encyclopedia Brown says that he must be lying because thunder happens after lightning...although he doesn't bother to ask how much time had passed between the boy waking and going to his window. It's very possible that he'd slept through the original lightning clap, awoken to the thunder and then as he was passing his window another flash of lightning passed by with its own accompanying thunder...it's not as though the storm stopped suddenly after he awoke.
  - And, in fact, reversing thunder and lightning is still absurd. If the lightning is close enough to illuminate things, thunder is unlikely to be more than 15 second or so delayed. The idea that anyone would be claiming to have gotten out of bed that fast, and gotten lightning and thunder swapped in their lie, is crazy.
- Another that always bugged me: One case was "solved" (by Sally, not Encyclopedia) because a couple sat in a restaurant with the man's back to the wall rather than the woman's, from which Sally deduced that each was actually a member of the other gender in disguise. This is because of a rule of etiquette that the woman should sit against the wall, so she can see and be seen. First of all this supposed rule of etiquette is at best a regional thing; I seldom meet anyone in Canada who has ever heard of it, though it's fairly well-known in the American South. But more to the point, even in the South, this rule is hardly ironclad; I see people violating it all the time when I'm in Texas.
  - Besides the total non-sequitur of the argument in this story, the supposed rule of etiquette is even inverted by some people. Having grown up with law enforcement officers who regularly carried a firearm while off-duty, it was a known rule in my family, and with most family friends, that the men will sit facing the entrance so they can most easily see. See also men who prefer to sit where they can most easily see their vehicle through the window, especially if they stopped for dinner after picking up a major purchase (building supplies, something loaded on a trailer, a new TV set, etc).
In the Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Priory School", Holmes deduces which way a bicycle was traveling by the way the tracks overlap. His description doesn't actually work: the overlap tells you which wheel left which track, but not which direction the bicycle was going. In the "New Annotated Sherlock Holmes", the story is followed by two pages listing various attempted retcons for the error. Not quite as bad as it seems at first glance, as some particular kinds of turns will have the turn start with the front wheel flicking to the outside of the turn to induce the lean needed to accomplish the turn. Ends of turns almost always have smooth rejoinings of tracks. This doesn't excuse the pathetic recon attempts, though.
- Another Holmes example: "The Adventure Of The Speckled Band" is all wrong. Snakes can't hear a high-pitched whistle, and they don't drink milk.
  - Actually, this is a case of Science Marches On. It is possible that in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's time, snakes are believed to drink milk and hear high-pitched whistles because possibly the Indians from India widely believed so.
  - Actually, Indians from India didn't think this, and in Doyle's time this was not common knowledge to anyone. He simply made it up to sound good, not realizing that 110 years later the Internet would catch up with him.
One of Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin stories features a mysterious murder, during which people nearby heard foreign-sounding speech: some said it sounded like German, others Italian, etc.; in each case, a language with which the witness was not at all familiar. It turns out to be an orangutan. In fairness, Poe was writing when little was known about orangutans, but to the modern reader, the notion that an orangutan's cries could be mistaken for human speech is absurd. Whatever the modern reader might think, interpreting strange sounds as a foreign language isn't absurd. The orangutan's behavior, on the other hand. The first sequel, The Mystery of Marie Roget, was also incorrect about when a bloated corpse would rise to the surface of water, though he was working with the knowledge of the day.
In a Mike Mist Minute Mystery by Max Allan Collins in the early 1980s, the title character supposedly identifies a crook because she claimed that she cashed a check using an automatic teller machine, which Mike claims is impossible. Here, the readers wrote in to note that it's done all the time; you enter the correct amount of the value of the check into the machine as a deposit and you are free to withdraw from that amount. And of course, Technology Marches On. You can now deposit a check into (some) AT Ms, and the machine is sophisticated enough to scan it and correctly parse the writing as a check amount.
One entry in The Armchair Detective series stated that one true way of knowing if a pre-World War Two telegram is false is if the phrase "World War One" or "The First World War" is ever mentioned, on the assumption that nobody could have foreseen a second World War before it started. However, it was used by some almost immediately after hostilities began. Note that the series in general isn't particularly prone to this. In his defense, those were not common terms, and would hardly be included in a telegram where they could easily say "The War" or "The Great War" with fewer letters. It may not be rock-solid evidence, but it's a good reason to be very skeptical.
This is Science Marches On rather than Did Not Do The Research, but one of Isaac Asimov's space mysteries hinged on the fact that one side of Mercury always faces away from the sun, because at the time it was reckoned this was true. Later research proved this wasn't the case, which Asimov acknowledged once he learned it — unfortunately, he couldn't see any way to amend this clinching evidence without completely re-writing the story.

Comic Books

The DC Comics miniseries Identity Crisis is one of these after another: first, the doctor doing the autopsy reveals that Sue Dibny couldn't have died from her burns, because there was no soot in her lungs, except that there wouldn't be soot in her lungs if she'd been burned to death. There would have been soot in her lungs if she'd been trapped in a burning building and had inhaled a lot of smoke, but that was never the theory of the crime; the theory was that she'd been blasted with high-energy electromagnetic radiation. Second, since it turned out that the burns were actually from a flamethrower, and the fire was put out quickly, it would have been obvious to even a cursory examination of the crime scene that an accelerant was used, which would have ruled out a high-energy light beam as the cause of the burns. This was used to clear a suspect who has light based powers, because there was no way he could have used a flamethrower instead of his powers.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Swedish edition of The Phantom had a page of reader-submitted material, of which one of the more popular were crime mysteries (see Bugs Meany Is Gonna Walk for more details). One of these had the culprit give himself away by referring to the banana as a fruit. Even though banana trees are herbaceous plants, a banana is biologically considered a fruit.

Live Action TV

This is done constantly on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader. Most of the time, the "correct" answer isn't technically right; it's a great deal more complicated than that, but the answer given is what a fifth grader would probably know about said thing. Therefore, if you are, in fact, smarter than a fifth grader, you'll lose.
The first episode of the second season asked how many watts are used during one kilowatt-hour. This question can't be answered because the units aren't compatible. A watt is a unit of power, the rate at which energy is converted over time, whereas a kilowatt-hour is a unit of energy. For instance, if you use a 100-watt bulb for 2 hours, you've used 100 * 2 = 200 watt-hours (or 0.2 kilowatt-hours) of energy. Asking this question is like asking how many miles per hour there are in a mile.
- (Or how many parsecs it takes to make the Kessel Run...)
  - Technically that one example is justified although it might be a retcon. The Kessel Run is through a very nasty piece of space filled with all sorts of hazards. Lesser ships plot a longer but safer route. The Millenium Falcon has an engine and navigation computer than can handle a much shorter route - hence Han's boast about distance makes sense.
- One possible answer to the question is ''1000 hours" (because 1000 h * W = 1 kWh). Of course, they'd probably count that as incorrect.
A rather amusing in-story example in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. When O'Brien is marked for death by some crazy aliens because he's one of the last people alive who knows how a forbidden superweapon works, they send a bogus video back to the Federation that shows him dying in an accident. His wife realizes something's fishy because he's drinking coffee in the video & she knows he never drinks coffee in the afternoon, when the video was supposedly taken. But then after the plot is foiled & Miles comes back home, guess what the first thing he does on returning is?
This trope is the entire point of the British quiz show QI. Stephen Fry hosts, with Alan Davies playing...some kind of straight man, or as straight as you can with four other comedians. A variety of questions are given to the panel, usually in some kind of conjunction with the letter of the season and topic of the episode, with points given for both correct answers and those that Stephen finds the most humorous. But the highlight is when somebody (usually Davies as the Butt Monkey) answers a question with what is considered the correct but is actually just the most well known, not correct. The most well known is the question, "How many moons does the earth have?" Davies answers (rather resigned, knowing such an easy question can only be a setup) "One" and gets flashing lights, klanston bells, and Stephen with "Sorry, that is incorrect. The correct answer, of course, is 2". Some episodes later, with pretty much the same question, which Davies then tries with the previous given correct answer. Incorrect. The answer had changed in the time between episodes, to "3". Then again in another episode, again with Davies, when science had reclassified the two extra "moons" as not correct by definition, and the answer had returned to the original (and originally incorrect) "1".
- They sometimes fall victim to this themselves, though. One example being a question about the smallest English county - expected "wrong" answer being Rutland, with the "correct" answer being the Isle of Wight, which apparently has a smaller area at the relevant tidemark. Unfortunately, in traditional terms the Isle of Wight isn't a county (it's part of Hampshire, and Rutland was the smallest traditional county), and in modern terms, both the reinstated Rutland and the IoW are unitary authorities - the smallest of which is Blackpool.
- Again that children aged 5-17 could drink alcohol in a pub but not buy it, as long as it is consumed not within the Bar e.g. The Lounge, the Beer garden or Games Room etc. However they got this from the English & Welsh Licensing Laws where a bar is clearly defined as anywhere on an ‘On-Licenced’ premises intended for consumption of alcohol which would include The Lounge, the Beer garden or Games Room etc. The place where beverage is poured and money is exchange is called a ‘servery’ in the licencing laws.
In an episode of Judge Judy, a man is trying to collect money owed to him by a woman who rented a room from him. He says he provided her with an invoice each month and brought copies showing how much the woman owed him. The invoices had the invoice date on each of them, but they also had a date in the header or footer showing the date they were printed. Judge Judy points out that these invoices are fake because they all have the same date. The guy makes the argument that the invoices were created when he said they were, pointing to the invoice dates, but the other date was the current date, the date he printed them. Judy said something like, "I'm not stupid, you know," and ruled in favor of the woman who owed him the money. This was an epic fail.
Naturally, as a medical mystery, House frequently invokes this trope, much to the frustration of Scott. Once however, it did it on purpose, when House had to deal with an amputee veteran of Vietnam complaining about House's noise. House, noting that the man was a Canadian, and that Canada didn't send troops to fight in Vietnam, attempts to blackmail him with the knowledge. Turns out Canada sent troops to enforce the Paris Peace Accords.
- There were also thousands of Canadians who fought in Vietnam as mercenaries, and there's also a significant amount of emigration between the countries. Either way it's perfectly possible for a Canadian to have fought in Vietnam.

Film

In the movie Life-Size, Casey Stuart tries to convince her father that Eve is a plastic doll come to life. Part of her argument is that Eve says she's from Sunnyvale, which is an obviously fake place that does not exist. Except that... yes, Sunnyvale is a very real location in California.

Tabletop RP Gs

In the battle between Archmage Gromph and Dyrr the lich in the War of the Spider Queen series; Gromph realizes Dyrr's shapeshift spell means he's not undead anymore, so negative energy spells can and do work on him. The kicker? he'd polymorphed into a construct, which is still immune to negative energy. There is also the fact that Lichs have an explicit exception to their immunity to Polymorph spells if it is their own spell (see "Immunities").

Theatre

A major plot point in Bells Are Ringing is that "Beethoven only wrote nine symphonies," so one couldn't actually order three hundred copies of Beethoven's Tenth Symphony. (The orders are really coded bets placed on horse number ten at Belmont Park.) Sketches for a Tenth Symphony which Beethoven had been working on before he died have been reconstructed into a movement in E-flat major. This, however, was first performed over three decades after Bells Are Ringing was written.