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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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ