[Renall]

Originally Posted by Jan-Poo

@Renall: I'd be actually surprised if there hasn't been a novel, movie or something on those lines which depicted a murder that ended up being just an accident. I can however confirm the existence of a movie with a clear mystery plot with a detective, suspects and all, which in the end showed how the victim actually killed himself with the intention of framing one of his many enemies.
That's actually where I got the idea of the "gun tied to a rope tied to a weight".
And I even liked that twist. Maybe the movie didn't respect the "mystery rules" but it did respect the rules of realism and plausibility which many other stories of this kind tend to ignore.

Originally Posted by rogerpepitone

There's _Trent's Last Case_, an early deconstruction of the mystery, in which the detective's reasoning is ultimately revealed to be completely wrong.

There's another book in which, after everything was out, one character remarked the detective had unmasked the conspiracy, had the detective reply, "There was no conspiracy. And I uncovered it by accident."

A Father Brown story had a death by natural causes be disguised to look like a crime so that the detective would be distracted from a planned robbery.

The difference here is that we'd be dealing not with a mystery that deconstructs mysteries, but a non-mystery that deconstructs the very lens of interpretation employed by mysteries.

Here, it's not that a non-crime is set up to look like a crime, or even that a non-crime that could be mistaken for a crime is so mistaken. Instead we have a simple non-event (x people enter, ?????, those people are now dead/missing) which is only a crime because outside entities have posited and constructed the possibility that a crime did occur. The police of Ange's world don't seem to think there was a crime, yet there is a flourishing degree of speculation about it. And perhaps there's something to be said for that.

The problem is, the message "a mystery novel's interpretive structure cannot apply to a realistic crime" is... well... self-evident. Nobody's saying otherwise. Nobody ever was saying otherwise. So what conclusion are you trying to make us reach (if that were the solution), ryukishi?

There's a certain synchronicity to "in the absence of information we prefer to believe in rules and rhyme and reason even if we must sacrifice the fundamental humanity of our subject" as it essentially applies to both the fictional layer and the meta-fictional layer, but that really isn't where the series has been going. It's been presenting itself, if not as a mystery, then as something within that genre's sphere of interest. We have been taught to expect rules and structure even as we are taught to question them, but only within a proper framework. In a way, that's all a mystery is.

To lack not only a murder, not only a crime, but any semblance of criminality or guilt - even a suicide has a certain culprit guilt angle to it - just seems to be sacrificing the preceding work for a thematic conclusion that no one was ever really disputing. Of course we'd like it if everyone was innocent; that was why we cheered for Battler in ep2 in the face of impossible odds and a seemingly inevitable realization that he couldn't defend everyone forever. However, that's not what we expect, and if we were led to this expectation by the author, it isn't because he fooled us, but because he lied about the very premise of his work.