There is a special place in Hell for mystery writers who cheat
So I recently picked up The Crimes of Doctor Watson used at Powells. It looked like a lot of fun: it's an interactive book that contains lots of little clues in envelopes that you have to take out and examine in order to try to solve the mystery.
And it probably would have been a lot of fun, if the author had played fair.
Now I guess you'd expect any good mystery book to have red herrings. That's fair. It's NOT fair, however, when the mystery is unsolveable unless the reader has recourse to information outside of the clues you have provided.
I spent the better part of a week pouring over the clues in that damn book. And there were several potentially very good ones: the handwriting on the envelopes noticeably changed over the course of the correspondence, particularly the way the "s" and the "h" were shaped. The supposed letter from Doctor Watson (from England to America) only had one stamp on it, whereas the letters from America to England had two. And at one point, Doctor Watson claims he had "coffee, bacon and rashers" for his breakfast...and any real Englishman could tell you in a nanosecond that rashers ARE bacon, which is a significant slip-up and would indicate an American trying to pass for a Brit. All of these would have been very good clues.
Too bad they weren't clues. They were just mistakes. >:|
No, the answer to the mystery counted on you being suspicious of one character and deliberately trying to bend the clues to suit that one character's guilt, instead of taking the plain facts of the clues themselves at face value WITHOUT PRESUPPOSITION, which was always Holmes's method.
The writer's worst offense, though? In order to get the significance of one particular clue, you needed to have read H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. A WHOLE DIFFERENT FUCKING NOVEL. Keep in mind, this book contained a full copy of "The Final Problem" just in case you needed clues from the text. It was supposedly that all-inclusive. And in the end, one clue's importance hangs on you having read an ENTIRE FUCKING NOVEL that has NOTHING AT ALL to do with the story you're telling?
Duane Swierczynski, I spit on your word processor.
(Note: the intrepid confused Reader is also presupposed to have read the entire Holmes canon after The Final Problem, in order to know something that Watson never mentioned again after that story. And we're also supposed to automatically guess that the author independently decided to make the word "bereavement" mean something that it manifestly does not mean.)
The one and only clue I liked was the name of the recipient of Watson's letter: Col. H. Kelsh Resmo. Obvious, yeah. But still cute. Especially in "Resmo's" letter to Watson at the end.
Q
So I guess this is one of those books that should encourage fledgling writers, because damn, if that cheating piece of drek can get published...