Agatha Christie: Clues and Surprise Endings

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Agatha Christie puts murder on the menu

Along with millions of other mystery readers, I’ve smacked my head at the end of Agatha Christie’s books and thought, “I should have figured out who the murderer was. All the clues were there.” How does Dame Agatha pull off a surprise ending time and again while playing fair with the reader? Three of her strategies for putting us off the scent start with “s”: Sidetracks, Stereotypes, and Sympathy.

Sidetracks
Dame Agatha leaves the clues in plain sight, yet sets us off on the wrong track. The victim’s purse contains keys on two key rings, a lipstick, theater tickets, and sunglasses. One person asks, “Why wouldn’t she put all the keys on the same ring?” Another points to the tickets: “Who went with her to the theater?” With attention drawn to the keys and the tickets, we forget the other items. A hundred pages later, a character no sooner comments that the victim never wore lipstick than a scream leads to the discovery of another body. The dramatic event overshadows the second lipstick clue. 

Keys, tickets, lipstick, glasses

Stereotypes 
Dame Agatha counts on her readers for stereotypical reactions. We assume the innocence of certain types of people: an impish child, a caring doctor, a diligent policeman, a righteous judge, an unobtrusive servant. Yet Christie makes each of those the murderer at least once. She even uses her own stereotypes to fool us. Time and again we encounter the same cardboard character in her books, for example, the gruff military man returned from some distant outpost with his vocabulary reduced to “harrumph.” Christie pulls off the surprise ending when the figure she habitually uses for comic relief is revealed as the murderer. 

She also gives a twist to stereotypical situations like the eternal triangle. A married man with a wandering eye falls for a femme fatale while his long-suffering wife endures his neglect. The reader sees a familiar situation and assumes the wife will be the victim murdered by either the husband or the “other woman.” Dame Agatha always dashes those expectations. If she wrote a version of Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf wouldn’t be the bad guy.

The Usual Suspects

Sympathy
Dame Agatha leads us away from the correct solution by playing on our sympathies. A person subjected to poison pen letters, threats, or narrow escapes from death arouses compassion rather than suspicion. The surprise ending reveals the would-be victim as the murderer. 

We also sympathize with anyone who appears to seek truth and justice. The character who asks for the detective’s help in solving or preventing a murder sits at the bottom of the suspect list. Christie’s ultimate sleight of hand is making the murderer the character through whose eyes we view the action, the narrator. She pulled this off spectacularly in the book that made her reputation. But that wasn’t the only time she used this device.

Déjà Vu
The next time I read an Agatha Christie , I’ll watch out for the three S’s—Sidetracks, Stereotypes, and Sympathy. Even so, I probably won’t figure out whodunit.  As Robert Bernard writes in A Talent to Deceive, Christie can use the same trick “a second time and we are still deceived”--and entertained.