Whodunits and the Untidiness of Real Life

I like mysteries, both novels and television shows. I am particularly fond of mysteries with a strong “whodunit” element. This isn’t surprising. I love all sorts of puzzles. So naturally when I read a mystery, I want a chance to figure out what happened before the detective does.

Some fictional detectives are particularly good at deducing facts from the crime scene or from the way that suspects present themselves. Sherlock Holmes is famous for his deductions. Even detectives less sharp than Sherlock often draw clever conclusions from little clues--the unfinished cup of tea, the jar of pens on the left side of the desk, the two dirty glasses in the sink.

It’s particularly fun when the fictional detective suddenly realizes the importance of a clue seen earlier, and the reader sees what triggered his realization, without being told what he has finally figured out. In one episode of “Death In Paradise,” for example, Detective Richard Poole opens the blinds onto a sunny Caribbean day and … Aha! It’s time to gather the suspects. And time for the audience to figure out what the detective has just realized.

But there is something that troubles me slightly when it comes to making deductions from the scene of the crime. In real life, there are all sorts of reasons why objects may be left or arranged the way they are—reasons that no outsider could possibly guess.

Consider this photo.

 

Desk, partially tidied up.

What might a detective make of it? The computer mouse is on the left, but the pencil jar is on the right, as are most of the loose pens. Here are a few possibilities:

1. The victim is right-handed, but the left-handed murderer stopped to check a file on the victim’s computer, moving the mouse to the left side for convenience.
2. The victim is left-handed, and the murderer has moved the pencil jar—though it’s harder to explain this answer. Was he searching all the items on the desk for something? Or just trying to find a pen that works?
3. The victim is right-handed but uses her mouse with her left.
4. The victim is left-handed but rarely uses pens, so pushed them all out of the way (but then why aren’t they all neatly in the jar?)

The answer is (3). I started mousing with my left when I was having problems with my right wrist. By the time my wrist was better, I had gotten good at it. When I tried putting the mouse back on the right, I discovered something interesting. Since the number pad is on the right of the keyboard, if I put the mouse on the right while centering the letters in front of me, I am forced to extend my arm further out to the side to use the mouse than if I give the job to my left hand. So most of the time, I mouse left-handed.

(What else can you deduce from this photo? I'm curious.)

When detectives make their clever deductions from the scene, they do so against a background of expectations. They assume the victim would not carry around someone else’s lost earring in her pocket and accidentally drop it on the rug. They assume a person doesn’t make herself a pot of tea and then leave it undrunk simply because she had a sudden (but otherwise meaningless) attack of heartburn. If medicine is on the bathroom counter, they would assume the victim had used or planned to use it, rather than that she was making a half-hearted attempt to clean out the medicine cabinet. (People in mysteries are much tidier than I am.)

I love to read mysteries with clever deductions, and I love to guess at what the clues mean, just as the detective in the novel does. But I must admit that when we do so, we are both assuming a world without people’s quirks and particular histories. I wonder if someone has written a mystery that acknowledges this fact?

(On an unrelated note, it is annoying when an author gets his facts wrong. Ellery Queen mysteries are great at letting the reader try to puzzle things out, but in one, there is a colorblind valet. The valet’s master knows this, so he writes “red tie” on the list of what he is wearing that week when he wants the valet to pick out a green one, and vice versa. This not only misunderstands colorblindness—red and green would both have looked vaguely beige-y, I think—but it doesn’t even make sense. If the valet could reliably distinguish red from green--no matter how his subjective experience of them differed from other people’s--he would have learned to label “red” those things that other people called "red" and so on. Fortunately, the solution did not turn out to depend on this.)

Till next post.