i think everyone in the whole world forgot that mystery doesn’t have to equal crime
sometimes it’s just like. what happent ?
i love when a mystery story has the detective investigating what appears to be a heinous crime, but the reveal at the end is that… nobody dunnit. there was not a crime. the entire thing was a hilarious misunderstanding, including all the clues, and all the ways they got interpreted with increasing confirmation-bias-fueled suspicion as the story progressed
i have not actually seen many examples of this, though.
the ones I can think of are children’s books. (which says something about society always wanting to convince children that everything’s actually ok and bad things don’t actually exist. but i digress).
adults are the ones who mostly need to learn that malice shouldn’t be the first assumption for things that can be explained by incompetence or just plain chaos. I want Hercule Poirot playing this story with 100% dead seriousness