Submitted by -something_something t3_zvr666 in books
Agatha Christie's novels feel so cozy, like hanging out with a friend while they solve a dilemma. I can rely on Christie to give me a mystery where all the pieces are there, you just have to pay enough attention to the details of people’s personalities to put them all together. She also writes entertaining characters to interact with her detectives. And she can still keep you guessing! The path to the inevitable conclusion is always just as fun and entertaining as finally getting to solve the mystery at the end.
From a remote island to a snow-stalled train car, she favored locations isolated from society. By restricting the scope of her stories, Christie limited possible suspects and built tension by forcing characters to stay put— even with a killer among them.
Sometimes she further heightened the drama by making the characters strangers, unsure of who they can trust. But while her settings are eerie and extraordinary, her characters are just the opposite.
One of the biggest criticisms of Christie’s novels is that they’re full of two-dimensional people. But Christie avoided complex characters for a reason. By reducing people to a handful of simple traits, she provided readers with predictable suspects. Well, usually predictable. Christie also used the audience's expectations against them.
However, this typecasting sometimes relied on what contemporary readers know to be harmful stereotypes. She frequently caricatured particular occupations and ethnic groups for comic effect, reinforcing the prejudices of her time.
This is certainly not an element of Christie’s work worth emulating, and fortunately, many modern mystery writers have found less problematic ways to use this technique. Even when she got it wrong, Christie worked to make her characters feel authentic.
She closely observed the people around her and constantly scribbled down details from overheard conversations. She would then rearrange these details to piece her mysteries together, often switching who the murderer was as she worked. This approach kept information murky and disoriented even to the sharpest readers.
However, there’s an important balance to strike between being clever and being confusing. Nobody wants to read a predictable mystery, but if things get too convoluted you can lose your reader altogether. Christie handled this in part by keeping her language simple and accessible. She used short sentences and clear, snappy dialogue to help readers follow the information. This kind of clarity is essential because the best mysteries string their audience along with a carefully laid trail of clues.
When a character cries that “Everything tastes foul today,” just minutes before he dies, the reader races to determine who poisoned his beverage. But they’re likely failing to truly consider this clue. If everything tasted foul that day, then he’d been poisoned long before that drink.
Christie also used clues to intentionally mislead her audience. For example, readers might recognize a clue associated with one suspect, only to learn that it was being used to frame them. Other times, she built misdirection directly into the story’s structure— like when a narrator reporting the murder is revealed to be the killer.
Outside crime and clues, there’s one more ingredient in Christie’s formula: the detective. Christie created many sleuths, but her most enduring are Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. Neither this petit Belgian refugee nor this elderly amateur detective is a traditional hero. But their outsider status is exactly what helps them slip past security and make suspects let their guard down.
With Christie, a good clue is one the reader will remember, but usually, fail to completely understand that is what I think made her one of the greatest.
LamarJimmerson85 t1_j1qnzle wrote
A lot of Poirot are essentially puzzles, with the same pieces in different arrangements. The characters are all largely stock character 'types', but they're always enjoyable and it allows for misdirection because we expect certain types to behave in certain ways.
Christie is also surprisingly funny. The Poirot novels that include Ariadne Oliver are good fun.