Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks (4 page)

The Trail of false clues laid by the murderer

‘Thou Art the Man’, published in 1844, is not as well known as the other Poe stories but it includes at least two influential concepts, the trail of false clues and the unmasking of the most unlikely suspect. Although a minor theme in many Christie novels, the idea of a murderer leaving a trail of false clues is a major plot device in
The A.B.C. Murders
and
Murder is Easy
; and in
Towards Zero
it is taken to new heights of triple-bluff
ingenuity.

The unmasking of the least likely suspect

Like its counterpart above, the unexpected solution, this was a career-long theme for Christie and appears at its most stunning in
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
,
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
,
Crooked House
and
Curtain.
The double-bluff, a regular feature of Christie’s output from her first novel onwards, also comes into this category.

Psychological deduction

Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ pioneered the ideas of psychological deduction and the ‘obvious’ solution. In this type of story, the deductions depend as much on knowledge of the human heart as on interpretation of the physical clues. In Poe’s story Dupin’s psychological interpretation of the suspect allows him to deduce the whereabouts of the missing letter of the title. The Foreword to Christie’s
Cards on the Table
explains that the deductions in that book will be entirely psychological due to the lack of physical clues apart from the bridge scorecards. And
Appointment with Death
, set in distant Petra, sees Poirot dependent almost entirely on the psychological approach.
Five Little Pigs
and
The Hollow
each have similar emotional and psychological content, although both novels also involve physical clues.

The most obvious solution

Poe’s employment of the ‘obvious solution’ of hiding in plain sight (using a letter-rack as the hiding place of a letter) is adopted, though not as a solution, by Christie in ‘The Nemean Lion’, the first of
The Labours of Hercules
. The solutions to, for example,
The Murder at the Vicarage
,
Death on the Nile
,
Evil under the Sun
and
The Hollow
, among others, all unmask the most obvious culprits even though it seems that they have been cleared early in the story and have been dismissed by both detective and reader. In her
Autobiography
, Christie writes: ‘The whole point of a
good
detective story is that it must be somebody obvious but at the same time, for some reason, you would find that it was
not
obvious, that he could not possibly have done it. Though really, of course, he
had
done it.’

So, Christie’s output adhered to most of the conditions of Poe’s initial model, while simultaneously expanding and experimenting with them. Although Poe created the template for later writers of detective fiction to follow, early in the twentieth century two practitioners formalised the ‘rules’ for the construction of successful detective fiction. But these formalisations, by S.S. Van Dine and Ronald Knox, writing almost simultaneously on opposite sides of the Atlantic, merely acted as a challenge to Agatha Christie’s ingenuity.

S.S. Van Dine’s ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’

Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939) was an American literary figure and art critic who, between 1929 and 1939, wrote a dozen detective novels under the pen name S.S. Van Dine. Featuring his detective creation Philo Vance, they were phenomenally successful and popular at the time but are almost completely – and deservedly, many would add – forgotten nowadays. Vance is an intensely irritating creation, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of seemingly every subject under the sun and with a correspondingly condescending manner of communication. In
The American Magazine
for September 1928 Wright published his ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’. Christie knew of S.S. Van Dine; some of his novels can still be seen on the shelves of Greenway House and she mentioned him in Notebook 41 (see
Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks
), although it is doubtful if she was aware of his Rules until long after they were written. Van Dine’s Rules are as follows:

1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery.

2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played by the criminal on the detective.

3. There must be no love interest.

4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit.

5. The culprit must be determined by logical deduction – not by accident, coincidence or unmotivated confession.

6. The detective novel must have a detective in it.

7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel.

8. The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means.

9. There must be but one detective.

10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story.

11. A servant must not be chosen as the culprit.

12. There must be but one culprit no matter how many murders are committed.

13. Secret societies have no place in a detective story.

14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific.

15. The truth of the problem must be at all times apparent provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it.

16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, and no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations.

17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt in a detective novel.

18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide.

19. The motives for all the crimes in detective stories should be personal.

20. A list of devices, which no self-respecting detective story writer should avail himself of including, among others:

• The bogus séance to force a confession

• The unmasking of a twin or look-alike

• The cipher/code-letter

• The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops

• The comparison of cigarette butts.

Ronald Knox’s Detective Story Decalogue

Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888–1957) was a priest and classical scholar who wrote six detective novels between 1925 and 1937. He created the insurance investigator detective Miles Bredon, and considered the detective story such a serious game between writer and reader that in some of his novels he provided page references to his clues. When he edited a collection of short stories,
The Best Detective Stories of 1928
, his Introduction included a ‘Detective Story Decalogue’. These distilled the essence of a detective story, as distinct from the thriller, into ten cogent sentences:

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

2. All supernatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need long scientific explanation at the end.

5. No Chinamen must figure in the story.

6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition that proves to be right.

7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.

8. The detective must not light on any clues that are not instantly disclosed to the reader.

9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts that pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

But as will be seen from a survey of Christie’s output, many of the Rules laid down by both Knox and Van Dine were ingeniously ignored and often gleefully broken by the Queen of Crime. Her infringement was, in most cases, instinctive rather than premeditated; and her skill was such that she managed to do so while still remaining faithful to the basic tenets of detective fiction.

Agatha Christie’s Rule of Three

In order to examine these Rules, and Christie’s approach to them, I have grouped together Rules common to both lists and have divided them into categories:

• Fairness

• The crime

• The detective

• The murderer

• The murder method

• To be avoided

Fairness

Both lists are very concerned with Fairness to the reader in the provision of information necessary to the solution, and with good reason; this is the essence of detective fiction and the element that distinguishes it from other branches of crime writing. Van Dine 1 and Knox 8 are, essentially, the same rule while Van Dine 2, 5, 15 and Knox 9 elaborate this concept.

Van Dine 1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery.

Knox 8. The detective must not light on any clues that are not instantly disclosed to the reader.

Christie did not break these essentially identical rules, mainly because she did not need to. She was quite happy to provide the clue, firm in the knowledge that, in the words of her great contemporary R. Austin Freeman, ‘the reader would mislead himself’. After all, how many readers will properly interpret the clue of the torn letter in
Lord Edgware Dies
, or the bottle of nail polish in
Death on the Nile
, or the ‘shepherd, not the shepherdess’ in
A Murder is Announced
? Or who will correctly appreciate the significance of the smashed bottle in
Evil under the Sun
, or the initialled handkerchief in
Murder on the Orient Express
, or the smell of turpentine in
After the Funeral
?

Knox 9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts that pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

Hastings has been dubbed ‘the stupidest of Watsons’ and there are times when we wonder how Poirot endured his intellectual company. And, of course, Agatha Christie herself tired of him and banished him to Argentina in 1937 after
Dumb Witness
, although he was to return for
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
, written during the Second World War but not published until 1975. It can be argued that the intelligence of the Watson character
has
to be below average because it is necessary for the Great Detective to explain his deductions to the reader
through
the Watson character. If the Watson were as clever as the detective there would be no need for an explanation at all. If Poirot were to look at the scene of the crime and announce, ‘We must look for a left-handed female from Scotland with red hair and a limp,’ and Hastings were to reply, ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ the reader would feel, justifiably, more than a little exasperated. And, of course, this Rule overlaps with Knox 1 (see below) in the case of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
because Dr Sheppard in that famous case was acting as Poirot’s Watson.

Van Dine 2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played by the criminal on the detective
.

This Rule seems to negate the whole purpose of a good detective novel. Surely the challenge is the struggle between reader and writer. In essence, the writer says: ‘I present you with a challenge to spot the culprit before I am ready to reveal him/her. To make it easier for you, I will give you hints and clues along the way but I still defy you to anticipate my solution. However, I give you fair warning that I will use every trick in my writer’s repertoire to fool you but I still promise to abide by the fair play rule.’ As Dorothy L. Sayers said in the aftermath of the Roger Ackroyd controversy, ‘It is the reader’s business to suspect
everybody
.’

Into this category come Christie’s greatest conjuring tricks, including
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
and
Endless Night.
In both these novels the reader is fooled into accepting the bona fides of a character who is taken for granted but not ‘seen’ in the same way that all the other protagonists are. The narrator is a ‘given’ whose presence and veracity the reader accepts unquestioningly. And, indeed, the narrator’s veracity in each case is above reproach. They do not actually
lie
at any stage. There are certainly some ambiguous statements and judicious omissions but their significance is obvious only on a re-reading, when the secret is known. In Chapter 27 of
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Dr Sheppard himself states:

I am rather pleased with myself as a writer. What could be neater, for instance, than the following?
‘The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door-handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone.’
All true, you see. But suppose I had put a row of stars after that first sentence! Would somebody then have wondered what exactly happened in that blank ten minutes?

All true; but not one reader in a thousand will stop to examine the details, especially not in the more innocent era of the 1920s, when the local doctor had a status just below that of the Creator.

Michael Rogers, in
Endless Night
, is also scrupulously fair in his account of his life. He tells us the truth but, as with Dr Sheppard, not the whole truth. But if we re-read Chapter 6, which recounts a telling conversation with his mother about ‘his plan’, what a new significance it all takes on when we know the truth. The ‘plan’, and even ‘the girl’, are no longer what we had originally supposed. This novel has much in common with
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
and
Death on the Nile
, as well as with
The Man in the Brown Suit
and
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
. In the first two titles, two lovers collude, as in
Endless Night
, in the murder of an inconvenient wife, stage a dramatic quarrel and have seemingly foolproof alibis;
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
also features a poisoning which happens in the absence of the conspirators. In the latter two titles, the narrator (a diarist in
The Man in the Brown Suit
) is exposed as the villain.