Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Making: Stories and Secrets from Her Archive - includes an unseen Miss Marple Story. John Curran
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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:
Ronald Knox’s Detective Story Decalogue
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