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  • prustage@alien.topBtoBooksSherlock Holmes amusing observation
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    10 months ago

    It is interesting, and not unique to Doyle by any means.

    I am currently reading my way through a lot of detective books by Doyle’s contemporaries (Boothby, Morrison, Meade & Eustace, Le Quex, Austin Freeman, Bramah, Futrelle, Reeve, AK Greene etc) and it is quite common for the culprit to be identified and arrested but for the story to then carry on at some length with a kind of “post mortem” where the detective explains what actually happened and how he worked it out.

    It wasn’t really until Christie came along and showed how to organise the denouement so that the explanation comes first and leads up to revealing the culprit right at the every end.