"I conceal it
I can see it
I can feel it coming
The beginning of the twist."
- "Beginning of the Twist",
The Futureheads
Of course, the last person to see him never commits the crime. That would make it too easy. One of these days I shall write a book in which two men are seen to walk down a cul-de-sac, and there is a shot and one man is found murdered and the other runs away with a gun in his hand, and after twenty chapters stinking with red herrings, it turns out that the man with the gun did it after all.
An untwist is what happens when
Chekhovs Gun looks like a
Red Herring.
For example, suppose Alice has been murdered. The only other two people in the house at the time are Bob and Carol. Bob acts mean and surly to the detective, doesn't treat Carol well, and reveals he had both a motive and opportunity to kill Alice. Carol, by contrast, is very polite and helpful, and is visibly upset at Alice's death.
A
Genre Savvy viewer would quickly conclude that Carol is the murderer and Bob is innocent. Why? Naturally, the evidence that Bob did it was planted by the author to mislead the audience into drawing a false conclusion. On the other hand, Carol's niceness is seen to be an act to conceal her own guilt.
In many cases, the above description is exactly how it happens (see: most episodes of
CSI). However, sometimes the author pulls a fast one - it turns out
Bob is guilty after all! All that evidence against him, which the reader dismissed on the grounds of being too obvious, is actually correct and valid. Furthermore, Carol cooperated with the detective because she's that sort of person, and she was genuinely sad that Alice died.
And thus is illustrated the essence of
The Untwist. The author drops a large number of hints at the start of the story which a
Genre Savvy reader assumes to be obvious
red herrings, and thus is surprised when, later on, it turns out that the simplest, most obvious explanation was the correct one. Somehow, the author has managed to
subvert the reader's expectations by not subverting their expectations,
or something. (That is, instead of a
Double Subversion, it's a zero subversion.)
In most cases,
The Untwist is the unintentional result of a writer being
heavy-handed with
foreshadowing, such that the reader assumes simple hints are red herrings. It
can be done deliberately, but doing it deliberately and
well requires a great deal of skill. A common way of doing it deliberately is by playing a
Discredited Trope completely straight. Other times, the writer didn't intend the plot point to be a surprise at all - the fans produced an Untwist by expecting a twist where there was none.
Contrast the
Shocking Swerve, which pulls a twist literally out of
nowhere, often
derailing the plot in the process.
Occasionally played with, e.g. in one fairly famous mystery book, the obvious person is guilty - but the obvious
evidence and
way he committed the crime is false: It was all part of a
Xanatos Gambit based around "double jeopardy" laws which prevent people from being tried for the same crime twice. Basically, he planned to trick the police into using the false evidence at trial, which he would then easily dismiss.
Truth In Television, as in
Real Life, most homicide victims are killed by someone they know, and, following Occam's Razor, the most obvious suspect is usually right.
No examples, please. Any plot development can become The Untwist to a sufficiently paranoid reader. Take your personal examples to Troper Tales.
