Salman Rushdie is an example of a master writer who will eat this cake and still have it. He often states preety early in the book something like "this was Y, X's wife, who will later kill him in his sleep, in his room, with a bread knife", and when the time of killing comes he will still manage to surprise you.
This reminded me of a particularly grisly character introduction in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. It's played to the opposite effect where it's not going to be a surprise at all. It's hardly even suspenseful, but hangs another helping of dread over the story.
> Toadvine glanced at the man's forehead but the man's hat was pushed down almost to his eyes. The man smiled and forked the hat back slightly with his thumb. The print of the hatband lay on his forehead like a scar but there was no mark other. Only on the inside of his lower arm was there tattooed a number which Toadvine would see in a Chihuahua bathhouse and again when he would cut down the man's torso where it hung skewered by its heels from a treelimb in the wastes of Pimeria Alta in the fall of that year.
It's not really the gun on the wall, the bread knife, or the tattoo. It's the narrator revealing a kind of untrustworthy omniscience by spoiling future details of the story.
