2. I always go into any plot like the one in Knives Out - intricate locked-room murder mystery with comedy, eccentric and manipulative victim, literally everyone has a good motive, etc. - with the assumption that the first person you should suspect of involvement in the crime is the corpse. My friends said this is because I am too optimistic and normal people do not even consider this, but on reflection, I blame Ellen Raskin. When The Westing Game and The Tattooed Potato are your introduction to the genre, apparently you pick up tropes that are not as standard as Ellen Raskin makes them seem?
To be fair, no one else in the Westing Game had any involvement at all in the death, and so the corpse had to be the one to tell people it was a murder mystery.
Sam Westing: I was murdered!!!! Everyone: sounds fake, but you deserved it Sam Westing: my ex-wife did it!!!! Everyone: that's your ex-wife?????? anyway, still deserved it
But the thing about locked room mysteries is you already know it's a twist, and you're genre-savvy enough to know that it has to be confounding enough that someone wrote a story about it. It ties in with one of my annoyances with tv cop/mystery shows: they're so attached to the idea of doing a twist that they'll take things and then twist them into bizarre directions (the first kidnapped child of a serial childsnatcher ended up taking control of the situation and was abusing the kidnapper! The first child was the one who kidnapped the rest of them and framed the original kidnapper!) (and that was the least infuriating of the ones I remember), so you already know they're gonna do some shit, so why not blame the corpse for arranging it? You know you can put them in the room when it happened!
no subject
To be fair, no one else in the Westing Game had any involvement at all in the death, and so the corpse had to be the one to tell people it was a murder mystery.
Sam Westing: I was murdered!!!!
Everyone: sounds fake, but you deserved it
Sam Westing: my ex-wife did it!!!!
Everyone: that's your ex-wife?????? anyway, still deserved it
But the thing about locked room mysteries is you already know it's a twist, and you're genre-savvy enough to know that it has to be confounding enough that someone wrote a story about it. It ties in with one of my annoyances with tv cop/mystery shows: they're so attached to the idea of doing a twist that they'll take things and then twist them into bizarre directions (the first kidnapped child of a serial childsnatcher ended up taking control of the situation and was abusing the kidnapper! The first child was the one who kidnapped the rest of them and framed the original kidnapper!) (and that was the least infuriating of the ones I remember), so you already know they're gonna do some shit, so why not blame the corpse for arranging it? You know you can put them in the room when it happened!