alt title(s): Open Mystery
Chief Wiggum: Hey, I crack cases all the time. Like the case of the symphony conductor who murdered his star cellist.
Lou: That was an episode of Columbo, chief. They show you who the bad guy is at the beginning of each one.
Wiggum: Yeah, but you have to
remember!
Also known as the "
Open Mystery"; a style of
Crime And Punishment show popularized by
Columbo.
The traditional mystery challenges the viewer to solve the mystery along with the detective. Usually, the viewer is disadvantaged by the fact that the detective knows more than the viewer (
We Would Have Told You But;
Tomato Surprise). But in the
Reverse Whodunnit, the advantage goes to the viewer: we actually get to
see the murder as it is committed.
The "mystery" for the viewer is not "whodunnit" but "howcatchum." We know who, what, where, when, and why, perhaps in more detail than the detective will
ever know. For the viewer, the question is: how will the detective solve what appears to be a perfect crime?
A successful
Reverse Whodunnit requires a very intelligent criminal, capable of designing a crime complex enough that its solution remains interesting even if you already know who did it and why.
It also requires a far cleverer detective than you can get away with in a standard Whodunnit, because the writers can not rely so much on misdirection to make his job look hard. For example, solving any
Scooby Doo mystery would be trivial if Velma let the audience get a good look at the clues instead of hiding them until
The Summation.
Sometimes called a "Police Procedural" (but not to be confused with the
Police Procedural) because its focus is on the
procedure rather than the
solution.
This was probably invented by R. Austin Freeman in 1912, in his collection of detective short stories
The Singing Bone, which featured Dr. Thorndyke. He called this concept the 'inverted detective story'.
A subtrope of
Internal Reveal.
Examples:
Film
Literature
- Dr. Thorndyke was one of the first to do this; several of his stories will show the killer performing an apparently perfect coverup in the first half, then following it with scientific deduction through the second half.
- These were followed by Malice Aforethought (1931) by Anthony Berkeley Cox, and most of the Department of Dead Ends stories by Roy Vickers.
- The subtitle of Feet Of Clay is "A Discworld Howdunnit", though the actual story is a classic whodunit.
- Examples from literature, later adapted into films: The Day Of The Jackal by Frederick Forsyth and A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin.
- Although in The Day Of The Jackal the investigators locate the assassin by pusuing a line of ivestigation based on a false assumption regarding his true identity.
- Captain Leopold Incognito had the variation that the villain (and reader) knew Leopold would be making an undercover investigation, but did not what identity he would be using.
- Used to great effect by Mary Higgins Clark in numerous mystery novels.
- The final book of Larry Niven and Steven Barnes's Dream Park trilogy, The California Voodoo Game. The first two books were Whodunits; in this one, almost at the start, we see the villain kill someone to help cover up a theft, but we're not told what the theft is. So not only do we read to see how the heroes figure him out and catch him, but to discover what was stolen. Has the two most brilliant Xanatos Gambits this troper has ever seen colliding, one from each side.
- The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester spends its first five chapters showing a man commit an incredibly complex murder, then the rest of the book follows the officer who suspects he did it and is trying to prove it. Subverted a bit because even the killer isn't completely aware of his own motivation for the crime, which proves to be a pretty big obstacle for the officer to overcome.
Live Action TV
- Columbo is a pioneer for the "howcatchum" style, and the creators invented the term. Rather than puzzle out the perpetrator from a variety of suspects, Columbo always focuses his investigations on the actual perpetrator and uses his unassuming style to amass enough evidence for an arrest.
- Many Monk episodes
- Diagnosis Murder does this a great deal.
- Law And Order Criminal Intent used this format in its first couple of seasons, showing the whole crime at the beginning and (usually) setting Goren and Eames on the culprit and harrying them into showing their hand. Later seasons show the circumstances around the murder, but leave the killer's identity ambiguous.
- Variation in Frasier. One episode starts with an entirely innocent explanation for why a cracked skull would end up under the floorboards of Frasier and Niles' old house, the remainder of the episode consists of the two of them discovering it and totally misinterpreting the evidence.
- The short-lived Police Squad! series by Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker.
- The CSI episode "Killer" alternates its point of view between the killer and the CSIs, showing his motivations and attempts to cover up his crime as the investigators get closer.
Manga and Anime
- In Death Note, the main character is secretly an infamous murderer and the series follows his attempts to avoid suspicion from police and a few genius detectives.
- The long running anime Detective Conan does these occasionally to mix things up.
- Monster. In this instance, the hero himself knows who the killer is for almost the entire series, it's just finding and capturing him that's the problem.
Video Games
- Video game example: The first two cases in Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney are Reverse Whodunnits.
- Very often the nature of the actual guilty party is blindingly obvious as soon as you meet them, (At least to anyone with any Genre Savvy) so an element exists of this in most of the cases throughout the series. The real fun is in figuring out how to PROVE it.
- The first case of Miles Edgeworh: Ace Attorney Investigations also starts like this.
