Surprisingly the “butler did it” trope owes its origins, not to an actual literary trend, but a random book by a forgotten author that you’ve probably never heard of: 1930’s The Door by Mary Roberts Rinehart. A novel which was hurriedly written to give her sons’ new publishing company a bestseller. And even in 1930, despite it not happening in many stories, it was still considered hacky for mystery writers to pin the crime on butlers. Why? Because just two years before Rinehart’s novel hit stores, art critic and mystery author S.S. Van Dine published his essay “Twenty Rules For Writing Detective Stories” in which he writes that: “A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit” because “it is a too easy solution.”
Regardless, The Door was a huge hit at the time, and its success meant that the murderous butler became an “easy target for comedians and satirical writers” who “pounced … on the archetype.” So the butler doing the crime became widely circulated in whodunnit parodies rather than an actual influence on the genre.
“Redshirts” Weren’t More Likely To Be Killed On Star Trek
One of the most famous unwritten rules of Star Trek — other than “Admirals are universally evil,” “the Holodeck is a goddamn death trap,” and “Always wash your hands after touching Kirk” — is, of course, that crew members in red uniforms are fatally doomed. Every time one of these so-called “redshirts” beams down to a planet’s surface alongside the main crew, they end up being eaten by a slime monster or choked by a toxic alien daffodil.
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