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Originally Posted by HarryT
It's also a mystery trope that if you have six people in an isolated house, and one is murdered, every one of the other five people will turn out to have had a good reason to commit the murder  . |
Apparently for mysteries it's some sort of "requirement" that one the various people that the detective/inspector/private eye interacts with end up being the murderer. And the murderer is always someone who the author puts in the background and makes them seem irrelevant; who can forget the old "the butler did it" rejoinder. And as others have pointed out, at the end the authors go through all sorts of logic gyrations and gymnastics to justify how and why the murderer was motivated.
That isn't so bad when the murder is committed in an isolated house, but I read one by Ian Rankin where it was a serial murderer in London and he still made it one of the nobody characters that the inspector randomly talked to. I was extremely disappointed and annoyed. That's when I investigated and found out that many readers expect this convention.
Whereas for ones that are police procedurals it's about the detective figuring out who did it by building up the evidence. Those tend to be more satisfying for me.