This week: The Butler Did It Edited by: Carol St.Ann  
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| This past week, while researching whodunits where (one of the staff) did it, I came across this information on a mystery writers discussion board and was so intrigued, I had to share it. Hopefully you’ll enjoy its fun facts as much as I did. Kudos and thanks to Cecil Adams. |
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Ever wonder where the expression, “The butler did it” came from?
Here is the edited, condensed version of what I’ve learned:
The expression “the butler did it” is commonly attributed to novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958), who, in 1930, published The Door, in which (spoiler alert) the butler does it. But the words “the butler did it” do not appear in the book, and Rinehart was hardly the first crime writer to implicate the servant class in her detective fiction.
One of the earliest was the writer who largely created the genre, Arthur Conan Doyle. In “The Musgrave Ritual,” from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893), the butler, Brunton, is found dead beside the chest that had contained the Musgrave family treasure — “the butler, guilty of betrayal and theft, paid with his life for his perfidy,” as the Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing puts it. In Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), suspicion initially falls on Ackroyd’s butler, owing to his criminal past.
Still, crime-fiction writers of the day tended to think that casting one of the hired help as the culprit was cheating. (That is, it was only okay for the butler to be suspected of doing it.) Essayist, S.S. Van Dine confirms this when he opines, “A servant must not be chosen by the author. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person (who) wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.” Noting the indifferent classism here, let’s follow it up with this clarification from the Oxford Companion: “Because the butler can move about the house in the course of his duties with complete freedom, so taken for granted by the other characters that no one pays attention to him, he makes an ideal culprit.”
Keeping this in mind, it’s no surprise, then, that traditional writers of the day felt the help as culprit was too easy. At the same time, the more adventurous writers argued that having the butler do it is the perfect opportunity to inject the resentments of the working-class into the world of those who fancy themselves high society sophisticates. Still, few writers took the bait, because, once the notion had been fixed in the popular mind by Ms. Rinehart’s book, it became an easy target for satirists like Damon Runyon and P.G. Wodehouse.
All that said, I think it fair and just that we give Rinehart her due. Even though the four famous words were never penned by her, she gets the credit for having made them a cliche.
As always, thank you for sharing some of your time and allowing me to share my interest in writing with you! I do hope you find this helpful or informative.
Until next time,
Carol
Source Citations:
Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing
“Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” essay 1928 S.S. Van Dine
“What, No Butler?” story 1933 Damon Runyon
The Butler Did It novel 1957 P.G. Wodehouse’s
CecilAdams / Straightdope
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Mystery: June 15, 2022 Issue [#11408]
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