Never the Obvious Suspect

She didn't do it. No, really.

Marge: I guess it's never the most likely suspect.
Lisa: Actually, Mom, in 95% of cases, it is. The rest of the time it's usually some deranged lunatic who did it for no reason.
(Everybody looks at Homer.)
Homer: Hey, I had a damn good reason.

— The Simpsons, "Who Shot Mr. Burns? (Part Two)"

In Detective Drama and other types of Mystery Fiction that focus on finding the culprit of a particular crime, the plot often follows this particular pattern:

1. A crime is committed.
2. A detective (or some other appropriate character) starts investigating the crime.
3. The detective comes across a very obvious suspect: someone who seems to have had the motive and means to commit the crime.
4. But the detective then discovers the obvious suspect couldn't have done it. Maybe the suspect has an alibi, or they can otherwise be ruled out. For example, someone has been murdered, and the forensic evidence reveals the killer was right-handed. The obvious suspect, however, turns out to be left-handed.
5. The detective then finds out the real culprit was someone unexpected. For example, it can be someone who seemingly didn't have any reason to commit the crime, until the detective uncovers said reason.

This plot formula is typically used in fair-play whodunnits and other types of mysteries where there are several suspects. The obvious suspect functions as a Red Herring, and the story often culminates with The Summation, where the unexpected culprit and the reason why they committed the crime are revealed.

Writers like to use the above formula because it adds a twist to the story. Discovering the culprit becomes an interesting puzzle instead of the detective simply finding the number one suspect and arresting them. However, this trope has become so common that the audience is now used to it, which means they pretty much expect the real culprit to be someone else than the obvious choice. In most cases, the twist is also Spoiled by the Format: if a detective show lasts for 45 minutes, and after the first 15 minutes the detective already appears to have caught the guilty party, it's almost certain the real culprit will turn out to be someone else.

Sometimes the writers like to play with audience expectations and subvert the trope as a Meta Twist by having the detective dismiss the most obvious suspect and go through others, only to discover later on that the person originally suspected was guilty after all. This is usually accompanied by some kind of unexpected reveal that explains how the obvious suspect was able to appear innocent. To use the example above, if the murder was commited by a right-handed person, and the detective rules out the obvious suspect because they are a leftie, it may later be discovered that they are ambidextrous, so they were the murderer after all.

See also Arkham's Razor, where a scenario like this is played for humor, Orgy of Evidence, which can apply to the first suspect, and Red Herring Mole, when the obvious suspect is (not) a spy. If the obvious suspect is ruled out by being the second (or third, or twelfth) victim, that's Suspect Existence Failure.

Since this trope deals with plot twists and surprise revelations, the examples below may contain spoilers!

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Played for laughs in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei with the character of Mayo Mitama: it's so obvious she is a delinquent (because she looks exactly like one and tend to do delinquent things in absolutely plain sight) that everyone somehow believes she must be a living case of Face of a Thug. Turns out, she is a thug in face, behaviour, and everything else.

Comic Books

• Subverted in an early John Byrne Superman story: Scotland Yard comes to see Superman for helping finding Winn Schott, aka the Toyman. They relate how they've been following him after a murder spree against the toy company owners who fired him, often using his own toy designs. A baffled Superman asks why they didn't just go after Schott in the first place, when the evidence was clear. With some embarrassment, the inspector admits that he and his team were so used to cases where the least likely suspect was the killer that it took a while before they realized it really was the most obvious person.

Film — Live-Action

• Played for Laughs in A Shot in the Dark. Clueless Detective Clouseau ignores blatant evidence that Maria Gambrelli, the woman he's infatuated with, is the killer, even though she keeps being found standing over a victim, holding the murder weapon, with no idea of what happened. Of course everyone except her turns out to be a murderer.
• Glass Onion: Subverted. Although Miles Bron is the person with the most obvious motive, Blanc and Helen quickly rule him out as a suspect in Andi's murder because doing something like that — killing a legal opponent of his shortly after their trial ends — would be too stupid on his part. Come The Summation, it turns out that Miles really is that stupid and is the one who killed Andi.
• The Usual Suspects is probably the Trope Codifier. Dave Kujan is so focused on Dean Keaton and arrogantly believes that he's smarter than Verbal Kint, who he thinks is just a stupid cripple, that he doesn't second guess the story he's told and automatically believes that Keaton is the legendary Keyser Söze. It's not until the end of the film where it's revealed that Verbal's story was put together on the fly, that he's not crippled, and is actually Keyser Söze himself. Unfortunately, by the time Kujan realizes this, he's gone.

Literature

By Author:

• Agatha Christie used this trope in various ways.
  • Subverted in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The murderer deliberately makes himself the very obvious first suspect, then prepares provably fake evidence, so the case against him will be overturned and he won't be suspected again (in English law at the time, one couldn't be tried twice for the same crime).
  • Subverted in The Hollow. The guilty party is standing near the shot man's body with a pistol in her hand. Yes, just like that. She really is the one and only perpetrator.
  • Subverted in Lord Edgware Dies. The criminal knew everyone was bound to suspect her, and took great pains in establishing a solid alibi, thanks to the help of a double, and demonstrating a seeming absence of motive. While in fact, everything happens just as everyone thinks: she walks into Lord Edgware's house and stabs him.
  • Lampshaded in Peril at End House. When Hastings dismisses a suspect on account on him being too suspicious to be guilty, Poirot says that while the least obvious guy is usually guilty in books, in real life, the most suspicious-looking one is usually the criminal. The ending, though, plays it completely straight, as the murderess has been posing as the intended victim the entire time.
  • Lamshaped again in The Murder at the Vicarage when Marple notes how she was onto the killer as "in the books, it's often the least likely person but I've found that rarely applies in real life."
  • Zig-zagged generously in Murder on the Orient Express. The more obvious and the less obvious ones – all turn out to be murderers in the end... that is, except for Poirot, his friend, the doctor – and the one who was the first and the most obvious suspect to be discovered: Countess Andrenyi knew of the crime, but was asleep while it was being committed.
  • Occasionally referenced by Tommy and Tuppence in Partners in Crime as part of their Conversational Troping of mystery tropes. For instance, in one story Tommy jokingly suggests the criminal is a woman in a wheelchair with no perceivable motive, because she's clearly the least likely suspect. In another Tuppence is disappointed that other evidence seems to rule out the wife, because she always suspects wives who were nowhere near the scene of the crime and couldn't possibly have done it.

By Work:

• Angels & Demons sees a plot to exterminate the Vatican with an antimatter bomb. The brains behind the attack remain hidden until the novel's end, but that doesn't stop Professor Langdon of suspecting Maximilian Kohler, a vocally anti-religious scientist who helped fund the antimatter bomb to begin with.
• Harry Potter:
  • Severus Snape is a sly, abusive teacher who has a clear affinity for the Dark Arts throughout Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. It turns out that Snape is not only not the antagonist, he is actively protecting Harry from the antagonist.
  • Draco Malfoy is a schoolyard bully who vocally supports the actions of the mysterious Heir of Slytherin in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Harry and co. spend months investigating the connection between the two, but it becomes obvious Draco has nothing to do with the Heir.
  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sees Harry suspect Snape and Malfoy yet again, this time of hatching several failed assassination plots from within Hogwarts. By this point, Harry's friends and allies are Genre Savvy enough to attribute his suspicion to his dislike for both people. As it turns out, Harry is completely right about both, even if their situations are much more complex than Harry assumed.
  • Sirius Black was caught at the scene of an explosion that killed twelve non-magicals and Peter Pettigrew laughing maniacally about how he killed the Potters. It was actually Pettigrew who killed those people, faked his death, and framed Sirius for it. Sirius was likely suffering from a mental breakdown from guilt about convincing James and Lily to make Pettigrew the Secret Keeper.
• Lord Peter Wimsey:
  • Played straight in Strong Poison, where Harriet is the obvious suspect in the poisoning of Philip Boyes - so much so that the story starts with a judge summing up the evidence for the jury at Harriet's trial. After the jury returns a hung verdict, Lord Peter has thirty days to prove that Harriet didn't do it.
  • Discussed in Busman's Honeymoon, just before interviewing the last person to see the victim alive:
    Lord Peter: Enter the obvious suspect.
    Harriet: The obvious suspect is always innocent.
    Superintendent Kirk: In books, my lady.
  • Conversational Subverting in The Five Red Herrings, where Lord Peter says that if he wrote a detective story it would open with a man with a gun fleeing a cul-de-sac containing a dead body and nobody else, and 20 chapters "stinking with red herrings" later, it would turn out he was the murderer.
• Parodied in The Macbeth Murder Mystery by James Thurber, in which a detective novel fan reads Macbeth and decides that Macbeth, being the obvious suspect, must be a Red Herring and thus that King Duncan was killed by someone else.
• Magical Girl Raising Project: In Restart, the goal of the players is to kill the Evil King hiding among them, whose goal is to eliminate the other players. Melville murders several of them in secret over the course of the game, and she has connections to a former villain, so naturally she must be the Evil King. Except she is just another player, and the real Evil King is Nokko, who never took direct action against everyone and was always cooperative, opting to manipulate them with her Emotion Control powers instead.
• Happens fairly frequently in Point Horror
  • In The Fun House, Tess suspects classmate Trudy is the one injuring the kids of various boardwalk owners after a beach party resulted in most of her friends being poisoned and falling ill because Trudy didn't eat anything. Surely she must have avoided the food because she had put rat poison in it, right? Trudy simply wasn't hungry that night, and had no idea about the poison. The actual culprit is Tess's half brother, who decided to make his classmates suffer because their parents tricked his birth family out of the boardwalk they owned (resulting in his birth father's suicide), then pressured his birth mother into selling her baby so Tess's father could have an heir (leading to her suicide).
  • In The Fever, you would think it would be jealous girlfriend of one of the local boys who is targeting the sick protagonist due to him visiting her regularly and making sure she's okay, especially when she shows up with her leg bandaged due to a cut (the protagonist had been assaulted while attempting to shave her legs, and used her razor to defend herself). It turns out to be one of the student nurses who killed the protagonist's best friend in her hospital room, because he threatened to tell her superiors about a terrible mistake she made with medication, that put a patient in danger, and the killer couldn't stand the thought of her perfect record and future as a nurse being put in jeopardy.
• In The Rithmatist, there's Professor Nalizar, who is much like Snape — a nasty, arrogant teacher who the protagonist Joel immediately suspects of being involved in the evil doings aroud the school. Eventually, Joel discovers that Nalizar was not the one who caused the disappearances and admits that Nalizar was a hero who saved his life — but in a subversion and something of an invocation of the trope, Joel then finds out that Nalizar was behind it all, and he gloats that, since Joel had already recanted his suspicions, he can't credibly accuse him again.

Live-Action TV

• In the Blackadder Goes Forth episode "General Hospital", Blackadder is tasked with finding a German spy in a British field hospital. There he finds an incredibly suspicious black-clad man with a heavy German accent who only states his name as Mr. Smith. Blackadder ignores him since he figures that "not even the Germans would be stupid enough to send a spy with an accent". Sure enough, when Darling takes Smith to General Melchett at gunpoint, the latter reveals Smith to be a British spy who has spent so much time undercover in Germany that he developed a thick accent.
• In Criminologist Himura and Mystery Writer Arisugawa, one of the potential suspects for the Screaming Castle case is a developer for the game that the murders are based on. He acts shifty when interrogated by the police and goes on a rant about them judging the game for depicting murder. Later on he runs into Akemi, who fits the profile for the Night Prowler's victims. When the next victim shows up, her dying description of the killer is a male with brown hair, and the developer (who fits the description) is loitering about the scene. Of course, he doesn't turn out to be the killer, and the description that the last victim gave is revealed to be a Red Herring to obscure that she actually committed suicide.
• Elementary often uses this trope, unlike the Sherlock Holmes stories the series is loosely based on.
• Gotham deals with the origins of various Batman villains and as such it is only a matter of time before The Joker is introduced. Enter Jerome, a Laughing Mad circus freak who murdered his own mother and imitates the mannerisms of Heath Ledger's and Mark Hamill's Jokers. As "The Last Laugh" shows, however, the Joker is someone else entirely.
• Hunter would always play this straight, except one episode that did the Bait-and-Switch. A woman dies during a gang rape, with the culprits let off on a technicality. When they are shot one by one, the victim's sister is the obvious suspect. Then it looks like a Corrupt Corporate Executive has a motive, and she's being framed as a patsy. Nope, it was the sister all along.
• Most episodes of iZombie follow this formula, though it gets occasionally subverted when the obvious suspect is revealed to be the killer after all (such as in the episode "Brother, Can You Spare a Brain?").
• Ralph Fellows in Murdoch Mysteries exploits this in his debut episode. As a huge fan of Murdoch's cases, he knows the first suspect is almost never guilty, so he intentionally becomes the obvious suspect to get Murdoch to discount him. It almost works.
• This is a standard part of the average Soap Opera murder mystery, where the first person arrested for killing the Asshole Victim inevitably turns out to be innocent, despite him/her having had a HELL of a motive/means/opportunity. Port Charles went for The Un-Twist when the prime suspect in the so-called "General Homicide" turned out to be exactly who all the evidence had pointed to.
• Shawn from Psych has had a few of these. One example is Emily Bloom from "Black and Tan: A Crime of Fashion". After her bosses (husband and wife fashion moguls) are murdered, she gets fingered as the prime suspect. She had motive (the wife was verbally abusive to her, the husband stole her designs, and she was next in line for company president), means (she made the wife's protein shake which contained the poison that killed her), and gives O'Hara a makeover when she comes to interrogate her (read: bribe). Not only is Bloom not the killer (the couple actually killed each other), she's almost the next victim when she accidentally drinks a poisoned shake.
• Star Trek:
  • In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Wolf in the Fold", Scotty is found on three separate occasions standing over the corpse of an attractive woman with blood on his hands and no idea of what happened. Captain Kirk uses Insane Troll Logic to argue that the ghost of Jack the Ripper is responsible. He's right, of course.
  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Violations" the Ullian Tarmin is suspected in a series of mental rapes, especially after Tarmin's son Jev manipulates Troi into believing she was attacked by Tarmin. After further investigation and a second attempt by Jev to assault Troi it turns out Tarmin was never the culprit, but it was his son Jev.
  • In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "The Passenger", a bad guy named Vantika escapes the death of his body by transplanting his mind to another person. The most obvious target for this mind transfer is Kajada, who becomes the main suspect because of this. But then it turns out Vantika actually resides in the brain of Bashir, whom none of the protagonists suspected, even though most viewers had probably guessed it long ago due to a very obvious hint dropped in the first act.
• In Twin Peaks there is a seemingly never-ending stream of characters with suspicious lack of alibis and suspect motives who could have potentially killed Laura Palmer and are investigated early on. Such characters include Bobby Briggs, who was cheating on Laura, recently quarreled with her, and behaves belligerently throughout the investigation, James Hurley, who was the last to see her alive, also quarreled with her, and had a bad alibi for what happened after he saw her, and Leo, a violent wife-beater who sold Laura drugs and turns out to have seen her after James did. But none of these obvious suspects killed her. Originally, the writers intended to never reveal who killed her, but the real culprit turns out to be someone no one could have suspected, and their identity reveals a dark secret within the town.

Video Games

• Blight Dream blatantly sets up Yuu, the brother of Amnesiac Hero Michiru, as the killer terrorizing the hospital and coming for Michiru. He is creepy and mysterious, seems to know a lot more than Michiru and is obviously keeping things from her, keeps her from leaving the house, destroys whatever she wrote in her memory-keeping diary if he catches her snooping around, and turns out to be keeping records relating to the hospital killings. The ending, of course, reveals that he is not the killer- Michiru is the amnesiac killer, and he was trying to keep her from finding out the Awful Truth.
• Life Is Strange presents three prime suspects for the one who kidnapped Rachel Amber — Nathan Prescott, the rich jerk son of Loan Shark Sean Prescott and local bully at Blackwell Academy who kicked off the plot by killing the original timeline's Chloe Price; David Madsen, Chloe's paranoid and controlling stepfather and chief of security at Blackwell; and Frank Bowers, a drug-dealer who is revealed to have secretly dated Rachel. By Episode 4, David and Frank turn out to be red herrings with no involvement in what happened to Rachel, while Nathan is merely working for the real culprit, photography teacher Mark Jefferson.
• Love & Pies: When Amelia decides to investigate if her business competitor and rival, Edwina, was behind the fire at the former's mother's café, Joe (actually his twin brother Sam masquerading as him) lampshades the trope by saying that "the real villain is NEVER the person [she thinks] it'll be." He was right, Edwina didn't start the fire because she believes that Windmill Café is already falling behind, so she didn't feel the need to sabotage it. In fact, she and Sebastian were at a board meeting for their company when the fire happened, also proving the latter innocent, and Edwina also phoned the fire department out of legitimate concern.
• Master Detective Archives: Rain Code plays with this in its second case. When investigating the Nail Man killings, one suspect is a Loony Fan of the killer who is always the first on the scene when they kill someone and has encyclopedic knowledge of their methods. Any Genre Savvy player would think they couldn't possibly be the Nail Man, and they'd be right. But they did commit a copycat murder.
• Post Mortem (2002): The prime suspect of the murder of the Whytes is a mysterious person who visited them at the hotel they were staying at and vanished. Every single detail that Gustave MacPherson finds about him seems to incriminate him. But when the man finally meets Gus, he explains that he was framed for the murder. Gus then goes on more investigation and uncovers the real killer as Dr. Kaufner possessed by De Allepin.
• In Wadanohara, the Blue Sea Kingdom has a traitor working to subvert the kingdom's defenses against their enemy Tostasu Kingdom. Everyone suspects the shark Samekichi- he has an intimidating, "bad boy" appearance, antagonizes Wadanohara and tries to keep her away from the sea, gets in the way of the mission to restore the kingdom's defenses, and refuses to explain his reasons for doing so. His silhouette is also occasionally seen destroying the shields and doing other bad things. Because of this, everyone (save Wadanohara) thinks it's him. So naturally, he turns out to have been framed by Sal/Syake-san, his own brother.

Visual Novels

• Played straight in all but two trial cases in the Ace Attorney games (including the crossover with Professor Layton), where the culprit is not the defendant. Given that the entire premise of the series is of a defense attorney trying to clear his clients of murder charges, the real application of this trope should be when Phoenix's first suspect isn't the guilty one, which happens a couple times as well. Most famously, in the final case of Justice For All, Phoenix accuses someone, only to later discover that his client is actually guilty after all. While he didn't kill the victim himself, he hired an assassin to do it, and therefore didn't set off Phoenix's lie-detecting Magatama when he answered "No" to "Did you kill him?".
• In Mystic Messenger, it becomes gradually clear that the supposed Big Bad Unknown, a leader of Mint Eye, is working for someone else, whom he calls The Savior. All clues initially point to V, the current leader of the RFA, due to how suspiciously he acts. He appears sparingly, talks cryptically about everything, divulges little information on the supposed suicide of the past leader (and his girlfriend) Rika, refuses to give a straight answer whenever the RFA members question him, disappears for days in each route and will not answer calls or messages, and generally behaves in a way that screams traitor. Notably, Rika's grieving cousin Yoosung is convinced that he is indeed responsible, and even Seven, later on in his route, begins thinking the same thing. In the first secret ending, it turns out that he is actually The Mole infiltrating Mint Eye to stop their plans; Rika herself is Unknown's boss.
• Danganronpa
  • In any case where there's a really obvious suspect (sometimes there's even more than one), you can be assured that they are innocent. Even if they're a Serial Killer who has already racked up an impressive body count prior to the events of the game.
  • In each game, there will be a few students whose Ultimate talent or backstory makes them seem perfectly suited for murder, or at least makes them seem untrustworthy. In the spirit of this trope, you can usually assume that they will never be the culprit of any case.
    • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc has Kyoko Kirigiri (whose Ultimate talent is unknown for most of the game, although she seems quite comfortable around corpses) and Toko Fukawa (who has a Split Personality that is an infamous Serial Killer). Both survive to the end of the game. Lampshaded by said split personality, who says she'd have to be a complete idiot to kill someone in this situation since she would be immediately found out.
    • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair has Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu, the Ultimate Yakuza, and Byakuya Togami (a returning character from the first game who has a significantly different appearance and personality, facts that are never brought up since the rest of the game's cast are new characters who wouldn't know Byakuya from the first game). Byakuya (actually the Ultimate Imposter pretending to be Byakuya) is the victim of the first case, while Fuyuhiko survives to the end of the game (though it's implied he did try to kill Mahiru but had his kill stolen).
    • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony has Rantaro Amami (whose Ultimate talent is unknown for most of the game); Maki Harukawa (once her true identity is revealed as the Ultimate Assassin); Kokichi Oma, the Ultimate Supreme Leader (what he is the Supreme Leader of is a mystery for most of the game, though he insists it's a Nebulous Evil Organization trying to conquer the world); and Korekiyo Shinguji, the Ultimate Anthropologist (not a particularly murder-y talent, but he's a pretty weird and creepy dude and even says outright in the first chapter that his appearance and behaviour is befitting of a culprit). Rantaro is the victim of the first case, Maki survives to the end (though she does try to kill Kokichi but doesn't succeed), Kokichi is the victim of the fifth case and was actually the Supreme Leader of a group of clowns who only commit petty crimes and pull pranks on people, and Korekiyo is guilty of two murders in the third chapter. Yeah, the Meta Twist is that for once, the obvious guy really did do it.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: In "Mystery Train", Finn tries to solve a series of murders on a train ride. He insists that the creepy conductor can't be the killer because he's too obvious a suspect. Subverted when it turns out the conductor is the killer. Fortunately, it was all a Fake Mystery and the conductor was Jake the Dog in disguise.
• Parodied in Bob's Burgers: When Linda performs a stage play in the restaurant, Louise plays a butler who reacts dismissively to the murders and loudly remarks that the murder weapon is hers. This is intended as a (lazy) Red Herring, with Linda actually being the killer. When the true killer is revealed, the audience becomes angry since clearly The Butler Did It and there were no clues pointing to Linda.
• Archer: In "Skytanic", when investigating a bomb threat on a zeppelin, Archer at first suggests the German second mate, Kraus, who has a sinister-looking scar emanating from under an eyepatch, but then immediately dismisses him as "too obvious" and moves on to a man in a (Sikh) turban. Turns out Mallory faked the bomb threat to get free tickets, but Captain Lammers coincidentally planted a real bomb (whether he did this independently or because of the bomb threat is unknown) with the intention of shorting the stock and recouping his retirement fund. Kraus knows how to disarm the bomb and also received the scar while saving a Jewish girl from a gang of skinheads who threw him a "curb party" for his efforts. He is unceremoniously shot by Lammers before he can disable the bomb.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: In "Mer-Mysteries", when it becomes clear that there's a Horde spy somewhere in the Bright Moon castle, most of the Rebellion quickly guess it's Shadow Weaver, but Mermista, who's read plenty of detective novels, immediately rules her out because she's the most obvious culprit.

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