Keeping a mystery fair: clues, alibis and reveals in two orders of time

A fair-play mystery is told in two orders at once. There is the order in which things happened: the poison bought on Tuesday, the brandy doctored at nine, the body found at dawn. And there is the order in which the reader learns them, which you arrange on purpose. Fair play lives in the gap between the two. Every clue the detective uses has to reach the reader before the solution does, and every lie a suspect tells has to be breakable from evidence the reader has already seen.

Most writers keep those two orders in their heads, or in a spreadsheet that drifts from the manuscript somewhere around the third draft. Lokee keeps them as two separate axes on the same characters. That lets you ask precise questions. What does the reader believe about the victim's cause of death in chapter 9? Which alibis are still standing at the reveal? Has the chemist's ledger actually appeared on the page before the inspector cites it?

This guide builds a small invented case and runs it through the whole workflow, then lists the mistakes that come up and the places where the app can't help. If separate "whens" are new to you, read Three kinds of "when" first; this guide applies that idea to one genre.

The case this guide follows

Lord Edmund Ashby is found dead in the study at Greyfold House on a Saturday morning. The inquest calls it heart failure. Inspector Maud Rennick suspects otherwise. The truth, which the reader learns only in chapter 18: Dr Hollis, the family physician, poisoned the decanter of brandy at nine o'clock on Friday night. His alibi is that he spent the whole evening playing chess at the vicarage, and the vicar backs him up.

The manuscript order:

1. Chapter 1: the body is found.
2. Chapter 2: the inquest says heart failure.
3. Chapter 3: Hollis mentions, in passing, a visit to the chemist.
4. Chapter 4: Hollis's statement. The vicarage, eight to ten.
5. Chapter 14: the stopped vicarage clock.
6. Chapter 18: the reveal.

The world order is different: the chemist on Tuesday, dinner ending at eight on Friday, Hollis leaving the vicarage at a quarter to nine, the brandy at nine, Ashby drinking it at ten, the body at seven on Saturday. Two of those moments never appear directly in the book. That is normal for a mystery, and it is exactly what Lokee is built to hold.

Build the crime in world order first

Start with the truth, because everything else is measured against it. Open Timeline in the sidebar. The panel at the top is World chronology, with the hint "Order is what counts. A date is optional." Add one point per moment the solution depends on: Hollis buys digitalis, Dinner ends, Hollis leaves the vicarage, Brandy poisoned, Ashby drinks, Body found.

Put them in the order they happened with the ↑ and ↓ buttons (Move earlier, Move later). There is no drag-and-drop; the arrows are it. For a mystery, dates are worth adding, because alibis are about the clock. In each point's Date (optional) control choose Real date, enter the day, and fill Time of day (optional): Friday at 20:45, 21:00, 22:00. If your mystery is set in an invented world, use one of your own calendars; a calendar and timeline for an invented world shows how to set one up.

If you type a date that falls before a point you ordered earlier, the point shows an amber note, "This date falls before the point above it. Left as you ordered it.", and nothing moves. In a mystery that is sometimes the plan: a forged letter dated after the crime can sit where it was actually written.

Then record what the world looked like. On Ashby's card, add a field such as Cause of death and set its Current value to Digitalis poisoning. Current is the truth as you know it now. Use Record a change… beside fields that change during the night, choosing a world point under When. Recording change instead of overwriting it covers that dialog in detail.

Mark what the reader is told, chapter by chapter

The second axis lives in the manuscript. Open a chapter in the Writer and choose Views → Narrative order. The panel's hint says what it is for: "Where the reader meets things, not when they happened." Add a point for each beat that changes what the reader believes: The inquest verdict in chapter 2, The chemist, mentioned in chapter 3, Hollis's statement in chapter 4. Each point is Anchored to either Whole chapter or one of the chapter's headings. Whole chapter is the durable choice: if you later rename a heading a point was anchored to, the point falls back to chapter level and says so rather than guessing.

Now record what the manuscript presents at those points. Open Ashby and use Record a change… beside Cause of death. The When list offers both kinds of moment ("Moments come from your world chronology, and from where your reader is in the manuscript"). Pick The inquest verdict and set the value to Heart failure. Or open the card's History tab and use the Record a change form, setting Axis to Narrative order.

Nothing on the card changes. Current still says Digitalis poisoning. What you have added is a statement about the book, not about the world. To read it back, set Viewing at the top of the entity page to a point under In the manuscript. The notice reads "Viewing … — what the manuscript has told the reader by there", and the card shows what the reader believes at that point.

One habit makes this cheap: add the narrative point in the same sitting you write the scene. A chapter that tells the reader something false is a chapter with one extra record in it. Doing it a month later means rereading the chapter to find out what you implied. Worldbuilding while you write is about the same habit on the world side.

Red herrings you can audit: "Readers don't know this yet"

A red herring is a place where the manuscript tells the reader something the truth contradicts. Lokee lists those. Open Consistency Check and run Run deterministic check (free). Under Just so you know you will find findings named Readers don't know this yet, such as "Readers know Lord Edmund Ashby's 'Cause of death' as Heart failure". Opening one shows the story point, what the manuscript presents there, and what the card says now, with the line "That is what a reveal looks like."

This group is information, never a fault. In a mystery it is a working register of every misdirection on the page. Read it before each draft and ask two questions of every line. Is this a deliberate deception? Do I pay it off? If a line is there by accident, because you wrote heart failure in chapter 2 but never meant the inquest to be wrong, you have found a continuity slip rather than a clue.

One thing to know about this list: it does not clear itself once you record the reveal. The finding is about the story point in chapter 2, where the manuscript presents heart failure, and that stays true after chapter 18 tells the truth. Read the list as "every place the book misleads", not as "misdirections still unresolved". Whether each one is paid off is your reading of the ending, and that stays a manual job.

What counts as unmodelled is up to you. Settings → Writing → When nothing is modelled in narrative knowledge decides what a field shows at a story point where you have recorded nothing about it: Show the canon value ("The reader is assumed to see what is true, until you record otherwise") or Show no value ("Nothing is shown until you record what the manuscript presents"). Either way the field is marked "not modelled". For a mystery, Show no value is usually the honest choice. The reader of a whodunit is not assumed to know the truth.

Running a continuity check before every draft explains the other findings and how to switch individual checks off.

Is every clue planted before the reveal?

The oldest rule of fair play is that the reader is shown every clue the detective uses. You can test that mechanically.

Make an entity type for clues in Settings → Structure → Entity types. Call it Clue, with a text field What the reader sees. Create one clue per piece of evidence the solution depends on: The chemist's ledger, The stopped vicarage clock, The second brandy glass. Leave the Current value as the full meaning of the clue, the way the detective explains it in chapter 18.

Then, wherever a clue appears on the page, record a change on the narrative axis at that story point: what the reader actually sees there. For the ledger, at The chemist, mentioned in chapter 3: Hollis says he called at the chemist on Tuesday. That is all the reader gets, and it is enough to be fair.

Now set Viewing to the story point just before the reveal and open each clue. A clue the reader has met shows the value you recorded. A clue you never put on the page shows "not modelled". Every "not modelled" clue at that point is a fair-play failure: the detective is about to use evidence the reader never saw.

For a per-character view, open a suspect's History tab and use Presented at. Choose a point in the manuscript and Lokee lists each field as the manuscript presents it by then ("What the manuscript has told the reader by this point — separate from what is true in canon"), with the story point each value comes from and the canon value beside it. Running down that list for Hollis at chapter 17 tells you exactly what the reader can hold against him.

Compare… in the Viewing control puts two moments side by side and highlights the rows that differ: chapter 4 against chapter 17 on Hollis's card is the investigation in one glance.

Alibis the consistency check can break

An alibi is a claim that a person was somewhere else at a specific moment. Lokee's continuity check has one finding built for that shape: In two places at once, a Problem that fires when two records put the same person in two different places at the same world point.

It needs to know which of your fields says where someone is. In Settings → Structure → Entity types, give your character type a field of type Place, or a text field with Says where someone is ticked. Place fields always count. Lokee has no other way to know which of your fields means a location.

Then record both versions of the night at the same point, Brandy poisoned:

• the truth: Whereabouts → Greyfold House, with the why What actually happened;
• the claim: Whereabouts → the vicarage, with the why Hollis's statement, chapter 4.

Run the check, and Problems lists "Dr Hollis is in two places at Brandy poisoned". That finding is the alibi your inspector has to break, written in Lokee's terms. The same conflict shows on any map where both places are drawn: the side panel lists him under In two places at once instead of choosing one.

Three practical rules follow from how the check works:

1. Pin the alibi to one moment. The check compares records at the same point. If the claim is recorded at 21:00 and the truth at 21:05, nothing is flagged. Decide which moment the alibi is about and record both versions there.
2. Corroboration is not checked. The vicar saying Hollis was with him is a separate record on the vicar's card. Lokee will not notice that two liars agree, only that one person is in two places.
3. The finding stays until the records change. Accept and Reject only dismiss a finding for the session. That suits a mystery: delete the claim record when your plot no longer needs it, and the finding goes.

Pulling alibis out of a draft you already have

If the statements already exist in your draft, extraction can propose the records. In the Writer, run Extract this chapter (or Extract selection on the statement itself) with Find events, places and dates (slower) ticked. Extraction then proposes where characters are, what happens and when. Dates come only from the text, either a date as written or a phrase like "the next day" counted from a date the text states, and new places and events are created only when you accept them.

Statements are where this earns its keep. When the text only reports a whereabouts ("Hollis says he was at the vicarage"), the proposal is marked as reported rather than stated, Reported, not confirmed, or Reported by the speaker when the text names one, and an accepted proposal keeps that as its note. Each proposal also carries Reader learns it in, the chapter where the manuscript presents it. You pick or create the World point, or choose Leave unresolved.

This is AI extraction, so it has a cost: cloud vaults use Lokee credits, and local vaults in the desktop app can use your own provider key or a local model. Everything goes through review; nothing is written until you accept it. Turning an existing draft into a living story bible covers extraction and review in full.

What happens when you change the murderer

Mystery plots get rewritten from the end. If you decide in the third draft that Clara, not Hollis, poisoned the brandy, that is a change of mind rather than something that happened in your world, and Lokee treats the two differently.

Edits you make to Current values, Hollis's Role in the crime, Clara's motive, are logged as revisions. The Revisions page lists each one with what it was, what it is now and where you made the edit, and lets you add a reason ("Why? (optional)"). In a cloud vault it is in the sidebar; in a local vault open it with Ctrl+K and Go to revisions. A short reason on the big ones ("Solution changed: Clara, draft 3") makes the history of the plot readable months later.

The night itself is recorded history, so fix it there. Set Viewing to Brandy poisoned, open Clara and edit her Whereabouts. Lokee asks "What does this edit mean?" and offers Record a change at that moment or Edit the record that set this value. Correcting a record you entered wrong is the second option; adding something new about that moment is the first. Delete Hollis's alibi records from his History tab if he no longer needs one. Deleting a recorded change leaves a revision saying what was removed.

If you are not sure yet, don't overwrite the case at all. Branch a timeline at the moment the solutions diverge and work the alternative out there; alternate histories and branching timelines shows how, and the last pattern there is written for mysteries.

Common mistakes, and the fix for each

Recording the lie as the truth. You set Ashby's Current Cause of death to Heart failure because that is what chapter 2 says. Then the reveal has nothing to reveal, and the check has nothing to compare. Current is always the truth; chapter 2 is a narrative-axis record.

Two alibis at two different moments. The claim at Dinner ends, the truth at Brandy poisoned. No finding, and you conclude the check is broken. Both records go at the moment the alibi covers.

Clues without their own entity. The ledger lives in a line of Hollis's description, so you cannot view it at a story point or see whether it has been planted. Anything the solution rests on gets a Clue card.

Dismissing findings and forgetting them. Accept and Reject last for the session, so a finding you waved away on Monday is back on Tuesday. That is intended. If a finding should go for good, change or delete the record behind it.

Letting the canon value leak. With Show the canon value on, a clue you forgot to record looks planted at every story point, because the field falls back to the truth. For a mystery, switch to Show no value before you run the fair-play test.

What Lokee doesn't do for a mystery

It will not tell you whether the puzzle is solvable, whether the reader will guess Hollis by chapter 9, or whether the vicar's testimony is believable. The checks compare records; they do not read the book. The fair-play test in this guide is only as good as the clues you bothered to model, and nothing warns you about a clue you never created.

One smaller gap: the check compares places at exactly one shared point, so an alibi spanning two hours is a point you choose, not a span it understands. Decide the moment that matters and record both versions there.

The whole case in five minutes

If you want to try the workflow on your own case before committing to it, this is the shortest path:

1. Timeline: add the three moments the solution depends on, in order. Date them if the alibi is about the clock.
2. On the victim's card, set the true cause of death at Current. In the chapter where the manuscript says otherwise, add a narrative point and record the false value there.
3. Give your character type a Place field. At the moment of the crime, record where the culprit really was and where they claim to have been.
4. Run Run deterministic check (free). You should see one In two places at once and one Readers don't know this yet.
5. Set Viewing to that chapter and watch the card lie to you.

A pre-reveal checklist

Before you draft the chapter where the detective explains everything:

1. Run the deterministic check. Every In two places at once finding should be an alibi you intend to break on the page; anything else is an error.
2. Read Readers don't know this yet. Every line should be a misdirection you pay off in the reveal.
3. Set Viewing to the last story point before the reveal and open every clue. Any "not modelled" clue has not been planted.
4. Use Presented at on the culprit's History tab at that point. The reader should be able to convict them from what is listed there.
5. Compare the first chapter with the pre-reveal chapter on the victim's card, to see the whole arc of what the reader has been told.

The consistency check, story points and Viewing work on desktop and in the browser; the check is not part of the Android app, and none of this needs AI or credits. The interactive demo has a small vault where you can try Viewing and the Timeline before modelling your own case. For the reference behind each feature, see Time, Consistency checks and Document Import in the help.