https://www.sunday-guardian.com/bookbeat/fair-play-and-the-detective-story
One of the detective fiction conventions established by the Detection Club, a group for British mystery writers that included Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie and Baroness Orczy and G.K. Chesterton and other genre greats, was that of "fair play". Information was not to be withheld from the readers, who ought to, if smart enough, have a chance at solving the crime themselves. There were to be no bizarre twists, the solution could not be a supernatural one; unforeseen identical twins or doppelgangers could not suddenly be revealed to have existed the whole time. The detective must not commit the crime, and the thoughts of the "Watson" figure must not be hidden (the rules were "codified" by Ronald Knox in 1929 after the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd).
I can recall an instance of "Fair-Play-Foul" - at least with the movie
The Bone Collector: The movie comes across as a twisted serial-killer procedure flick like
Silence of the Lambs kinda, but at the end the reveal is like "
Aha! The culprit is THIS PERSON! What a shocking twist that nobody could have predicted!"
Well...I couldn't have predicted because I had no idea who this character was. Maybe it made more sense in the book, but they did a big reveal that a minor character with like four lines in the opening scene was the bad guy all along and the response is "Who is that? Did I miss something? I didn't even know I was supposed to be curious about WHO it is..."
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