The Difference Between Rashi and Tosfos on Shas

Illustrated by the difference between Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler

Ben Shapiro has, k’darko bakodesh, made an ass of himself on the internet recently, complaining about the new Rian Johnson movie “Glass Onion.”

Ben Shapiro @benshapiro

First, the writing. The first half of the movie is a complete misdirect and a waste of time.

Many were quick to point out that this is kind of the point of a mystery movie. What, are you supposed to reveal the solution right away? Then it wouldn’t be a mystery! What did you expect exactly? Misdirects are kind of the point!

I’d like to do something out of character for me: Defend Ben Shapiro a little bit. Because not everyone defines the point of a mystery story as an exercise in fooling the audience. There are different kinds of mystery stories. There is one type where the point of the story is the cleverness of its solution. Disbelief of details within the story are suspended a little bit, because the point isn’t whether the story could happen or not, nor is it even to accurately depict the world and crime within it. The point is to marvel at the ingenuity of the detective in figuring it all out, and maybe meet some interesting characters along the way. The main name associated with this genre of mystery story is, of course, Agatha Christie, even though it had been done long before her. Inasmuch as Rian Johnson has made clear that his Benoit Blanc movies are homages to Agatha Christie, Shapiro is wrong to criticize Johnson for merely following the tropes of the genre.

But there is another type of mystery story, typified by writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, that has criticisms of the Agatha Christie style that echo Shapiro’s. In his monumental essay on the history of the detective novel, The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler derides other mystery writers for having plots that were too contrived, inaccurate¹, and unrealistic, featuring murder plots that simply would not happen in a realistic setting.

There are less plausible examples of the art than this. In Trent’s Last Case (often called "the perfect detective story") you have to accept the premise that a giant of international finance, whose lightest frown makes Wall Street quiver like a chihuahua, will plot his own death so as to hang his secretary, and that the secretary when pinched will maintain an aristocratic silence; the old Etonian in him maybe. I have known relatively few international financiers, but I rather think the author of this novel has (if possible) known fewer. There is one by Freeman Wills Crofts (the soundest builder of them all when he doesn’t get too fancy) wherein a murderer by the aid of makeup, split second timing, and some very sweet evasive action, impersonates the man he has just killed and thereby gets him alive and distant from the place of the crime. There is one of Dorothy Sayers’ in which a man is murdered alone at night in his house by a mechanically released weight which works because he always turns the radio on at just such a moment, always stands in just such a position in front of it, and always bends over just so far. A couple of inches either way and the customers would get a rain check. This is what is vulgarly known as having God sit in your lap; a murderer who needs that much help from Providence must be in the wrong business. And there is a scheme of Agatha Christie’s featuring M. Hercule Poirot, that ingenius Belgian who talks in a literal translation of school-boy French, wherein, by duly messing around with his "little gray cells," M. Poirot decides that nobody on a certain through sleeper could have done the murder alone, therefore everybody did it together, breaking the process down into a series of simple operations, like assembling an egg-beater. This is the type that is guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a halfwit could guess it.

The last two sentences are particularly fun. These types of stories have solutions which are so ingenious, only an idiot would guess it.²