Roger: Agatha Christie - Random Murderers?

Adapted from the post at the Impossible Crimes forum, impossible-crimes.ru/Forum/index.php

This belated analysis is mostly aimed to rebuke the frequent claims that in the Golden Age classical form of detective story any other character can be turned to a criminal by altering the pieces of the "jigsaw" in a minor way. Agatha Christie is frequently given as an example.

In particular, the most recent discussion of Five Little Pigs emphasized how arbitrary the selection of the guilty party in the novel is.

Here, I'll be attempting to prove the opposite claim. I'll show that in Christie's works, when she does her best, the murderer is never chosen at random from multiple possible options. Quite the opposite, the best works of her always first introduce the plot twist which hides the murderer, after which this murderer, specifically created for this novel, is supplemented by other suspects. Meanwhile the plot tricks themselves, the ones used to conceal the true guilty party, are in most cases repetitive and can be considered variations on a short list of methods.

This is what makes the murderer in Christie's best so noticeable among the other suspects. And this also makes the criminal's identity both quickly pinpointed by a reader accustomed to her methods. Obviously, the same reason makes the criminal very memorable and harm the re-reading quality of many of her novels.

The following study is based on the denouements of the novels: The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Sittaford Mystery, Peril at End House, Lord Edgware Dies, Murder on the Orient Express, A Three Act Tragedy, Death in the Clouds, The ABC Murders, Murder in Mesopotamia, Cards on the Table, Death on the Nile, Appointment with Death, And Then There Were None, Hercule Poirot's Christmas, The Sad Cypress, Evil Under the Sun, The Body in the Library, Five Little Pigs, Towards Zero, The Crooked House, A Murder is Announced, After the Funeral, A Pocket Full of Rye, 4:50 from Paddington, Ordeal by Innocence, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, Curtain, as well as the Mousetrap play.

The selection is quite explicitly done from the novels the solutions to which I remember (that is those stories I couldn't forget, and thus, at least good detective stories). But I hope everyone agrees this is the selection of her most important works, the ones that should be employed to understand the most important features of Christie's works. In the weaker novels, undoubtedly, picking the criminal at random can be used, as well as the rehash of older schemes.

Now I, never giving titles and hinting which novel has which type, give a purely quantitative classification. Everyone who read the novel will understand which plots are where, and for those who haven't read those yet, pure statistics cannot harm.

We start by eliminating Murder on the Orient Express, The ABC Murders, togehter with And Then There Were None.  I think everyone who read those would agree the peculiarity of the plot construction in each of the three points to this particular criminal, and it is impossible to replace them without destroying the plot. Indeed, these three novels are the most original in construction.

The solutions for the rest are normally leading to one of the tricks below, and in each of those the criminal is strictly separated from the other suspects, and that's why the unexpected unmasking startles the readers:

1) The murderer is not considered suspect at all, as, unlike the other characters, has an alibi for the crime, or the innocence is confirmed as early as the preliminary investigation. There are 11 plots using this trick, the most beloved and masterly employed by Christie;

2) The murderer has no imaginable motive to commit the crime. For example, the criminal is not even among the victim's relatives who inherit money by will; nevertheless, there is a hidden motive to be revealed later. There are 7 plots like that in the list;

3) The murderer is beyond suspicion because of being one of the investigators. There are 5 plots like this;

4) The murderer evades suspicion by making an illusion they were the intended victim all along. There are 2 plots like this;

5) The reader does not start to suspect the murderer as this character is described by the author in a way that, for the reader, eliminates any possibility of committing a crime. There are 2 plots like that (with very different realizations, any details are spoilers).

I emphasize it is possible by the murderer to use multiple ploys at once, such as provide an alibi and become an investigator. That's why there are more plots here than the novels.

Only 4 books do not fit under any of the variants listed (beside three eliminated at the outset). In these 4, anyone can actually be the murderer, and tiny alterations of the plot could change the candidate. However, out of these 4, two are specifically designed by providing a closed circle of the suspects with equal chances to commit the crime, and no one else could do it. Thus, in these plots the downside is actually the backbone of the experiment (whether it was successful, is another question).

There are only two books remaining, where the thesis is completely true. Perhaps it would also hold for a number of weak (especially later) works, which were not analyzed here due to me forgetting all of those (quite possibly, due to their weaknesses).

So, we must conclude that in the majority of her best books Christie builds the plot around a very particular murderer, instead of choosing one at random. Furthermore, the existence of a particular bag of tricks, which allow to hide a specific murderer, turns out to be the characteristic feature of Christie's work, setting her apart from the esteemed contemporaries. Of course, in some of their books other authors may also use those, but the key definitions of their style would not depend on those.

The question, however, whether the thesis of the "random murderer" holds for Golden Age in general, should be a matter of another discussion. For me though it's a brand mark of a weak detective story, not of the era it was written in.