I was watching Miss Marple - At Bertram's Hotel, and I began to think about what Truman Capote said in the detective spoof "Murder By Death", namely, how there will be some crucial bit of information left out that we don't get over the course of the story, so there is no way anyone could have ever solved it from watching the movie, or by reading the book, if that was the case.

Now it doesn't matter what it may have been; an American tv movie, an episode of a tv show, one of these British movie detectives, any one of them.

Were You ever able to solve who did it?

Maybe not guess what the reason was or the details, but were you ever able to go 'thats the culprit' and be right by the end of the program?

Now there is a tv movie from the late 1970s called 'Friendships, Secrets and Lies' about six sorority sisters (Paula Prentiss, Cathryn Damon, Stella Stevens, Loretta Swit, Tina Louise and Shelly Fabares) and one of them had an abortion and the skeleton of the baby is found years later when the building is torn down.

Boasting an all female cast (interesting to see Stella Stevens as the abused wife and we never see her husband hitting her, just her falling to the floor, then he storms out), my brother actually managed to pinpoint which one had the abortion and even that one of them was a lesbian.

And in a Doctor Who story "Robots of Death" one of the crew members on the mining vessel is sending the robots out to kill. Old bro actually made a correct guess on that one as well.

Now these are hardly brilliant detective pieces. Just citing them as example, mainly because I suck at this.

However, I did watch "And Then There Were None" with Barry Fitz, Judi Anderson, Walter Huston, C. Aubrey Smith, Mischa Auer, Cosmo Topper, Richard Haydn and I actually guessed who the killer was, not from any clues (there weren't any!) but because of who the actors were at that time, Oscar win and nomination-wise.

It stood that the perceived-biggest box office draw because of the Oscar, would be the one to be standing in the spotlight.

Well, I said I sucked at this.

Now Sherlock Holmes I wouldnt say was so much a whodunit detective story, so I don't know if his would count.

I watch alot of the Christie's, and I just wonder about them, if there were the clues in the books to give you an idea as to who the killer was, and, Heaven forbid, actually figure out WHY!

I gather they are altered for airing on television (seems a lesser known Christie husband-and-wife detective couple, Tommy & Tuppence, were altered for a Miss Marple mystery, with Miss Marple subbing for the husband with the wife, Tuppence), so I hope I don't get alot of 'the books are different'.

But in 'Target Zero' with Tom Baker, he mentions a child who commited a crime and that child had a distinctive physical trait.

Then in a conversation about life lines in a person's hand, a woman says that her husband has an extremely long index finger.

Turned out this was supposed to be the physical trait, hence this fellow was the child.

Were we honestly supposed to have made that connection?

Or in the one I watched (and actually enjoyed) 'Bertram's Hotel'

I've watched enough of them to know that the woman in the veil being shot at in the street wasn't going to be who we thought it was, didn't catch on that the two ladies switched behind the mailbox, but the first woman shot back with her pistol, with her left hand, because her right hand was ineffective from polio.

The second woman would now also shoot, but OOPS! She was right-handed.

Had the first lady not even fired the gun, then how would Miss Marple have solved this one?

Why was it important that the woman have the gun to begin with and fire at the sniper?

So Miss Marple could solve the crime, I guess.

It looked rather suspicious to me that a woman in London like that would so conveniently have a pistol on her person for when a sniper starts shooting at her.

So far, in watching the movies, tho I wouldn't mind getting copies of her books, or some of them, and checking them out, the Christie I have enjoyed the most was Sparkling Cyanide. Surely it was set up better in the movie to solve what took place at that dinner table.

Or one with Hercule Poirot. A woman is executed for murder, and one of five people asks Poirot to solve which one of them was the actual killer, as the woman who was put to death was innocent.

Fascinating watching. A crime that happened ten or fifteen years earlier and he pieces together who the killer was from their testimony.

Or Hitchcock.

I know we have all had it firmly engrained in our minds what took place, but did anyone (chuckle!) actually guess who the killer was?

I think the first time I saw the shower scene out of sequence in a special on tv, my brother was watching it as well, and once again, he picked up on the shadowy form of Mother as being a man.

Or else he already knew and he was trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

But was anybody ever actually able to guess who the killer was in any movie or tv show, even?

Thin Man, Charlie's Angels, Sam Spade, Starsky & Hutch, Matlock, Sidney Sheldon, Perry Mason.

It doesnt matter which one.

My boyfriend does this all the time. It doesn't matter even if it is a detective movie or what, he can always predict the ending of movies. And the weird thing is that I can never seem to figure the ones out that he can.