If done well, this literary device can add suspense or dramatic irony; if overdone, it invites comparison of the story to Victorian melodrama and sub-standard popular fiction.
[in other words:]...clues"[2] The phrase is used to refer to a group of Golden Age mystery writers, mostly female, who wrote novels characterized by the use of the "had I but known" plot in which the narrator keeps key pieces of evidence from the police, apparently for the sole purpose of prolonging their work.
[citation needed] The HIBK school is associated with the works of Mary Roberts Rinehart,[2] specifically The Circular Staircase (1908), in which "a middle-aged spinster is persuaded by her niece and nephew to rent a country house for the summer.
"[3] Other members of the HIBK school include Ethel Lina White and Lenore Glen Offord.
The HIBK school was parodied by Ogden Nash in his poem "Don't Guess, Let Me Tell You": Had-I-But-Known narrators are the ones who hear a stealthy creak at midnight in the tower where the body lies, and, instead of locking their door or arousing the drowsy policeman posted outside their room, sneak off by themselves to the tower and suddenly they hear a breath exhaled behind them, And they have no time to scream, they know nothing else till the men from the D.A.