Curate, connect, and discover
The Butler Did It - Blog Posts
You are the butler, and you just murdered the lord! But suddenly, the doorbell rings and his friends arrive for a surprise party! And worst of all, one of them is said to be a famous detective!
Manipulate the evidence, stray false information and construct fake motives for the other guests before the day ends to ensure somebody else will be accused during the detective's grand reveal!
The Butler did it - a reverse detective game, available now on itch.io!
The thing that messes me up about the whole “the butler did it” trope is that we literally have no idea where it comes from.
The earliest known piece of detective fiction in which the butler, in fact, did it? Published in 1930.
The earliest known article calling out “the butler did it” as an egregious cliché in detective fiction? Published in 1928.
Obviously there must have been earlier examples of detective fiction in which the butler did it, but none of them have survived to the present day, leaving us in this bizarre situation where the earliest known callout post about the trope pre-dates its earliest known actual use by a full two years.