Resultado de búsqueda
22 de may. de 2013 · Reader Chris wrote in wondering how “the butler did it” became a mystery fiction cliche and who the first guilty butler was.
The expression "The butler did it" is commonly believed to have been coined by mystery author Mary Roberts Rinehart in her 1930 novel The Door, although this is actually a real-world example of Beam Me Up, Scotty!.
- Origin of “The Butler Did It!”
- Using The Trope of The Guilty Butler
- Life Imitates Art
- The Usual Suspects
The concept of the phrase is generally attributed to Mary Roberts Rinehart who wrote The Door, a 1930 novel where the butler is revealed to be the villain. The exact phrase never appeared in her works, though. It’s believed that this concept came to be because servants in the Victorian era were typically underpaid and overworked, so the idea of ser...
When modern writers do use this trope, it’s usually subverted, inverted, or parodied in some way. For example, in the 2019 film Knives Out, the butler role is swapped with a personal nurse. The nurse does kill her employer, but only by accident, giving him a fatal dose of morphine. With minutes to live, he commits suicide to protect her from punish...
Rinehart herself almost became a victim to her own employee. In the late 1940s, she hired a new butler for her summer home. This upset her longtime chef, who had wanted the position for years. While Rinehart was reading in her library, the chef came in without a jacket, a violation of Rinehart’s dress code for staff. When asked where it was, the ch...
The “the butler did it” trope was once a legitimate technique in writing thriller and mystery stories. Now it’s become a tired cliche that everyone’s heard off. It’s still a fun tropeto play with during your writing exercises, or you can modify it to fit your narrative. You can make it a red herring of sorts to camouflage your true intentions. Just...
19 de ene. de 2023 · According to numerous sources, “the butler did it” trope was coined by Mary Roberts Rinehart in The Door, a 1930s mystery by the prolific author in which, well, the butler does it. In the novel, an elderly family nurse was murdered, and the revealed suspect isn’t confirmed until the very last page.
The Butler Did It is a phrase regarded as a cliche in detective fiction, and may refer to: "The butler did it", a phrase associated with the 1930 novel The Door by Mary Roberts Rinehart. "The Butler Did It", a 1973 single by Skogie.
9 de mar. de 2022 · American mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, known as "the American Agatha Christie," broke Van Dine's rule only two years later in her book "The Door," in which the butler is the murderer. Although the phrase "the butler did it" is associated with this book, it doesn't actually appear in the text. The book was popular but was also lampooned ...
9 de mar. de 2021 · "The butler did it" is a common trope indicating a hackneyed solution to a mystery. I have read several classic mysteries from the 1920s and earlier (Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie, Sayers, etc.) but do not recall a single instance of the butler's actually being the criminal mastermind, let alone enough such stories to justify the phrase ...
