Being fooled

The first time a book fooled me properly, I was twelve and it was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. My mother handed it to me off her shelf one rainy Saturday and said, "Tell me who did it before the end." I didn't. I got to the last chapters and the floor went out from under me, and I sat on the stairs with the book open on my knees, furious and delighted in about equal measure, and then I went back to the beginning to find out how she'd done it.

That's the part I want to write about. Not being fooled, exactly, but going back. A good mystery fools you and then lets you see that it was fair all along. Every clue was there. You read past them. When you go back, the sentences you skimmed the first time turn out to have been saying something else, very quietly, the whole way through. Christie didn't lie to me. I just believed what I wanted to believe, and she knew I would.

I've been thinking about this because my mother and I are still reading together on the phone, and last week we finished a book that fooled us both. I won't say which, because some of you might read it. My mother, who had the murderer by chapter nine in April, was not pleased. She said "well" in a way I haven't heard since I was sixteen and came home at two in the morning. Then she said it was very well done. Then she said "well" again.

There's a particular pleasure in it that I can't find anywhere else. It's not like a surprise in a movie, where something jumps out at you. It's more like finding that a room you've lived in for years has a door you never noticed. The world turns out to be slightly bigger than you thought, and you didn't see it because you weren't paying attention. Being shown that, kindly, by someone who was paying attention, is one of the best feelings I know.

It's what I try to do in my own work, when I get to, and it's very hard. The difference between being fooled and being cheated is narrow. If the twist comes from nowhere, the player feels tricked, and they're right to. If it's too obvious, they feel clever for a moment and then bored. The good ones live in between: the player didn't see it coming, and the moment they do, they realize they should have. I've written maybe two quests that land there, out of hundreds. I'm still working out how they did it.

And I'll say this for being fooled: it only works if you trust the person doing it. Christie could fool me because I knew she'd play fair. The writers who don't, you stop reading.

What's the book that fooled you best?