I'm working on a mystery novel based in the Golden Age of Detection -- a predominant focus on the puzzle of the methods of a fantastical crime -- and the narrator, The Watson, is a reporter from the fictional newspaper The Daily Hermes. To give the narrator a chance to meet the sleuth, the first novel actually follows a murder within The Daily Hermes. The narrator's role was essentially investigative journalism with a bend towards local, sensational murders. Thematically this is to establish the narrator's marked investigative inferiority to the main detective. Now, I know that in the past detective fiction authors like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers did their own detective work -- the former at the call of Scotland Yard and the latter due to her relationship with journalist Oswald Arthur Fleming -- but what I don't know is what authority was had by or how seriously writers or journalists who "solved" murders were taken, or what they were allowed to write about in the papers before it reaches the point of libel. Let's say an investigative journalist gets caught up in a murder a la your everyday traditionalist crime novel and takes up solving it. Are they able to make and write about deductions towards the methods and identity of the killer -- the whodunit and howdunit -- or does that become libel? Is a disclaimer that the work is entirely speculative necessary -- does it even help? How seriously are they taken? Would/have arrests been made based on the deductions of an investigative journalist? Would police look into it to ascertain the
