Conversation

Good mystery novels rarely do the true butler-did-it stunt of making the least likely person the murderer. If by least likely you think most irrelevant. Generally the murderer is important to the plot but the nature of the actual importance and apparent importance are different.
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We feel cheated if a truly peripheral character with few speaking lines, no character development, and no role in the events turns out to be the killer. Spectators and background extras are unsatisfying suspects. We want someone whose actions turn out to have a different meaning.
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Agatha Christie in fact often figures out how to make the most likely person, the spouse, the killer. Even cues it up with Poirot declaring, like a good Bayesian, that it’s most likely the spouse. She takes pains to explicitly have Poirot regect strangers/burglars/servants.
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Often the big reveal is interesting not because the murderer is a surprise (I often guess) but because the actual story beneath the apparent story is a surprise. Like an optical illusion flipping from duck to rabbit.
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As a seasoned consumer of hundreds of murder mysteries I can often guess the murderer early from peripheral cues outside the plot, like storytelling technique tells (one of my favorites in TV is a character introduced early who is played by an actor clearly too good for the part)
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Now here’s the thing. I was wondering if history works the same way. There’s no murderer per se, and “important” and “unimportant” rarely trade places. An individual random peasant will not suddenly turn out to be more important in a revisionist history than a famous king.
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Example. In the history of electricity, Edison and Tesla May trade places as hero/villain in different telling. Some tellings may declare that Samuel Insull was more important than Edison. But it would be a really weird surprise to read a version that centers J. Random Lab Tech.
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