Equally, a partner may be enticed into something without realising what they’re doing. If the detective has to work for their answers, it’s better for both the criminal and the reader alike. True, at least one of those uses it as an almost complete cheat, but this essentially relies on the same principle as a lone alibi: keep to a simple story, refute any accusations of lying, repeat, repeat, rinse, repeat. Indeed, to pick one example, the Edward Hoch-curated list of the top 15 impossible crime novels of all time - I refer you to parts one, two, and three of our podcast series on them - contains at least three cases of this very trope. It sounds cheap and easy, and therefore likely to lead to much disappointment from a narrative perspective, but this doesn’t always mean the novel is a complete write-off. Sometimes it turns out better than others… The simplest, and thus perhaps hardest to break, version of this is simply having another person to stand by and insist to the detective that you - the criminal - were definitely with them, or were definitely not near the scene of the crime, when you most certainly were not with them because you were at the scene committing the crime under investigation.
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