Paul! (Assuming you’re Pacifist Paul, not one of the other Pauls that is presumably online somewhere!) How are you? Not heard from you in forever!

I’ve probably expressed myself a bit badly – I don’t want the flash to be easy to catch exactly. I want it to be obvious enough later, when I’ve got all the information, that I kick myself for not being smart enough to get it. That’s why I think grounding the flash in context is useful. Like the Brie, the Bullet & the Black Cat, which I still think has the best one I’ve run into.

I’m going to have to spoiler this one a bit, I think, because I wasn’t very happy with my example before anyway and it’s probably not helping me to express myself properly. Spoilers therefore follow…

What I mean when I say the flash lacked context is that it relies on two facts: the murder has shaky hands and the murderer rests part of their defence on their having been painting Big Ben at a crucial moment. I’d feel better with a third fact in there, which makes it plain that the murderer (insofar as the murder and painter are the same) is meant to be a good painter, not a painter who might be so amateurish that they could paint with shaking hands and have nobody notice any difference.

My issue isn’t that the twist affecting who the murderer is is hard to spot, it’s that in retrospect there’s no real reason why someone who has shaky hands couldn’t try to paint Big Ben. (Even leaving aside the issue of what style of painting they were going for, where something impressionistic would sit quite happily with wobbly hands), there’s nothing to suggest the murderer is such a perfectionist, or has produced such an excellent, unwobbly, painting that their shaking hands make them unable to do so.

If another character had earlier complimented the murderer on, I dunno, the perfect way in which “their” painting captured the intricate patterns on a Turkish carpet, that third bit of information would combine with the shaking hands and the “painting Big Ben” claim to leave me going “Goddamn I’m stupid, I should totally have remembered that!” after the fact. I’d have stood no further chance of cracking the flash ahead of time, because my brain doesn’t work like that, but I like that “OHH of course!” moment where I feel pleasurably outsmarted. Instead my reaction was rather more “Huh. I guess shaking hands might make it a bit hard to paint?”

I think that’s not quite the same as the flash being too subtle, but the best explanation for how it’s not the same that i could find was that it lacked the context that makes it clear it is a flash (in this case, previous evidence that the painter was a competent and skillful artist who would be incapable of bringing themselves to paint if their hands shook – without that I think we all found there was no reason to believe someone with wobbly hands, who might well be a lousy artist anyway, shouldn’t attempt to paint something.)

I don’t particularly want things to be made more obvious, I just like them to be obvious in retrospect so I can admire how easily I was gulled. But, as I say, that’s a minor quibble and it bugged me less than my character only learning his secret three quarters of the way through despite presumably knowing it from the start. And there was a murder, and it was pretty sneakily done at that, without confusing DVDs or embarrassing notes about “what the people (if they were real) might have counted as murder rather than manslaughter if they’d actually been in this situation at this time actually”, so I can’t say I didn’t have a fun time of it!