… These statements had to be “true” in the sense that a great novel is “true”, even if the things related in it did not happen. To top it all off, there have been no charges of conspiracy against Mr Madoff. That means that, as far as prosecutors are concerned, and as far as we are permitted to speculate, this make-believe investment history was his own creation. He must have been one of the hardest-working men of his generation. [1]

"How much of Bernie Madoff pleading guilty is so that there won’t be testimony under oath and we’ll never find out what really happened?"

Doom has seen an awful lot of electronic ink spilled over the last little while dedicated to the proposition that the Madoff case was no more difficult than a session of Clue!  The fiendishly clever culprit who did in Mr. Body has been caught, his guilt proved, and now that he will serve 150(?!) years in prison we can all go up to bed with a clear conscience.

Or not. 

UPDATE: Alice M, my fiendishly clever daughter with an English degree and a job teaching math at a Montreal CEGEP, sends this just to mess with everyone’s mind.  Click the strip for original context. at XKCD.

Maybe things aren’t that simple.  That second quote above is from the astute Mrs. M herself, over Sunday’s Chronicle-Herald.  She’s an avid mystery fan, and knows when the obvious suspect is too obvious.  We’re bloggers, so outside of Igor’s spam-sense and Doom Family Values we’re free to think outside the box (or even outside the subject — this is the Monday open thread ;) )  No editor or publisher is going to limit our speculation, but just to get everyone warmed up with some plot-twist ideas, here’s a sneak preview of the movie version of the NYT’s & WSJ’s early coverage of the Madoff story.

… But at the very moment when the reader feels quite safe in an atmosphere of pleasurable reality and the grace and glory of the author’s prose seems to indicate some lofty and rich intention, there is a grotesque knocking at the door and the detective enters. We are again wallowing in a morass of parody. …

From Chapter 10 of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, by Vladimir Nabokov (1941).

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[1]: "Bernie Madoff’s life of make-believe", by Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times, March 13, 2009.