Agatha Christie: Plots, Clues and Misdirections – Thirty-Three Ways the Queen of Crime Deceives Us (2023) by Sally and Tony Hope

This was one of the books I received at Christmas, yet failed to include in my Christmas Books post, for the simple reason that I was in the middle of reading it at the time, and therefore it was miles away (well in a different room) from my other books. It wasn’t one that I was expecting, and it was not one that was on my radar. This is quite the feat as it can be quite challenging for my family members to come across a book of this nature that I don’t already know about.

Synopsis

‘Why do Agatha Christie’s novels continue to inspire each generation? The answer is the quality and range of her puzzles: her rich and varied structures of deception.

Christie broke the mould of detective fiction and rewrote the implicit rules of the whodunnit. Agatha Christie: Plots, Clues and Misdirections examines Christie’s skills as a whodunnit writer. It analyses her methods in setting her puzzles. It shows how she uses a combination of diverse plots, cunning clues and subtle misdirections. In the sheer variety and profusion of each of these elements Christie is without peer, and her combining genuine puzzles with entertaining narratives has never been surpassed.

In this unique analysis of how Christie sets her puzzles, two medical professionals and enthusiastic Christie fans explore the greatest of Christie’s deceptions – the impression that her writing is simple.’

Overall Thoughts

When I first read the blurb above, a red flag definitely arose when I saw the phrase ‘in this unique analysis’. It is unfortunately a statement which doesn’t stand up to too much scrutiny. The topics mentioned in the blurb are ones which countless blogs have explored, as well as excellent books such as John Goddard’s Agatha Christie’s Golden Age: An Analysis of Poirot’s Golden Age Puzzles (2018) and Agatha Christie’s Golden Age Volume II: Miss Marple and the Other Golden Age Puzzles (2021). Within the introduction itself, Sally and Tony Hope write that ‘little has been written about’ Christie’s ‘craft. Perhaps her books are just too enjoyable, too popular to be taken seriously as a subject of study.’ Later in the book they further opine that ‘few academics take Christie, or indeed the whole whodunnit genre, seriously as classic literary texts.’ These remarks seem rather out of the date now, as whilst in the past academia did not readily engage with popular literature, writers like Agatha Christie are now frequently examined. For example, in the Palgrave MacMillan Crime Files series alone you can find works on Christie by academics such as Mark Aldridge, J. C. Bernthal, Megan Hoffman, Merja Makinen and Susan Rowland. To that end I am curious as to how widely read the authors are. The further reading list at the back of their book only has 5 titles, 3 of which are Christie biographies. The other two are by Earl Bargainnier and John Curran. I am unsure if this list reflects the full extent of their reading or whether it is just a selection of titles they felt readers should try. Three biographies does seem rather excessive though.

In the acknowledgments, at the beginning of the work, it is mentioned that the Agatha Christie estate did not give them permission to quote from Christie’s stories. This puzzled me, as I thought authors could quote from other authors if properly citated and if the quote was under a certain word count. Having read this book I can attest that there are no quotes from Christie’s work at all and I do wonder if that negatively impacted the book, as the writers have to rely on paraphrasing. This in turn dictatea the type and level of analysis that can be produced.

The structure of Agatha Christie: Plots, Clues and Misdirections allots one “way” Christie deceives us, to each chapter, all of which are short and quick to read. For example, chapter 7 is called ‘Men were deceivers ever: Unlikely partners in crime’, whilst chapter 8 is named ‘Identity theft: People may not be who they seem to be., As you can see, these “ways” are not exactly groundbreaking.

At the start of each chapter, it is mentioned if there are any plot spoilers and if so, which titles are involved. This seemed like a nice idea until part way through the book it dawned on me that the chapter titles are so explicit in what they’re talking about, that the mere connection between a Christie title and the title of the chapter would be enough to provide spoilers, as you would then know what kind of deception to look out. For example, if you saw the title of chapter 4 ‘Missing the Target: Concealing the Intended Victim’ and then read which titles are mentioned in the chapter then you already know that the mystery has to include a concealed intended victim. Conversely, in attempts to avoid spoilers in other ways the writers often use the phrase ‘in one novel…’. I can see why they did this, but I felt this was strategy overused and added some ambiguity at times as it was not always immediately clear which book was being implicitly referred to.

The introduction to the book explains the authors’ approach to their project: ‘we began reading Christie together when we were medical students. We had been taught anatomical dissection in order to understand how the body works. We applied a similar approach to Christie examining the structures beneath the surface.’ They read each Christie novel three times: ‘first for the puzzle, secondly for the craft and lastly for inspiration.’ When conducting their third readings, they read the books chronologically ‘to see how Christie developed, and continued to refine, her craft.’

One of the main weaknesses of this book is that it lacks originality of thought, as it tends to trot out ideas that have been mentioned by many others. Chapter 1, for instance, looks at Christie as a rule breaker/bender and as usual Ronald Knox’s Decalogue is dragged out. This opening chapter also reveals another consistent weakness in the book as whole and that is the tendency for chapters to go off topic and spend a lot of time discussing tangents. That said if the chapters had their tangents removed, there would not always be a lot left, as they did pad them out. For example, chapter 7 is padded out with entry level biographical information on Christie, whilst chapter 9 which is called ‘Defacing the corpse: Ringing the changes on this whodunnit trope’, is padded out with a quote of three long sentences written by Dorothy L. Sayers. The reason for this appears to be so they could opine that Christie would have written 18 sentences in the same amount of space. But is this point worth using up one whole page for? Sally and Tony Hope do go on to compare the writing styles of these two Queens of Crime, and they mention that Sayers’ style includes dated attitudes. They then go on to assert that: ‘Unlike many crime writers of the time Christie presents no strong authorial attitude and therefore no attitude that dates.’ This to me felt like an exaggerated truth, in which the second half of the statement doesn’t really hold much water. Just because Christie’s personal beliefs are not written in 60ft letters in her works, does not mean that her work lacked dated attitudes. They have their timeless qualities, but they are not written in a social or cultural vacuum.

It could be said that it doesn’t matter if the chapters include padding, as long as it is interesting or useful. I can only speak for myself as ‘interesting’ and ‘useful’ are subjective terms in this arena, but I did not find the padding really achieved either goal. For example, the padding in chapter 10 is concerned with the possible writing period for Sleeping Murder and the evolution of its title. This padding heavily relied on the work of John Curran, so if you have read his publications then there is nothing new to learn here. Furthermore, in chapter 19, which is meant to be exploring clue clusters, the last third of the chapter discusses Poirot’s interest in women. The writers focus on Evil Under the Sun and spend much time paraphrasing different parts of the story. They come to the conclusion that Rosamund would have had a more fulfilling life married to Poirot than to the man she ends up with. Given the proposed topic for the chapter, hypothesising about Poirot’s suitability as a romantic partner seemed like weak analysis to me. There is much more padding I could enumerate but overall, the padding and the off-topic nature of the padding meant that the piece as a whole lacked a strong thread of argument running through it and through each chapter individually.

Another occasional issue which I spotted in the book was that there were moments when opinions are written as though they are facts. For instance, when mentioning another Golden Age author, Freeman Wills Crofts, they state that: ‘In 1934 he published The 12.30 from Croydon, which must have been an inspiration for Christie’s 1957 title, 4.50 from Paddington.’ Now this could be correct, but there is no ‘must’ about it, not unless you have evidence to back it up, which if these authors do, they do not share it. Crofts was not the only writer of that period to use a title like that and 4.50 from Paddington was written over 20 years later. Would Crofts’ book still have been highly memorable at that point?

Some chapters indicate more limited research, in statements like this: ‘Death Comes as the End is Christie’s most unusual book […] In writing this Christie was something of a pioneer.’ The chapter does note the work of Lillian de la Torre and Robert Van Gulik, yet the authors still ill-advisedly write: ‘Death Comes as the End may be the first historical whodunnit novel.’ They do only say ‘may’, but it is unfortunately not the case. Bloggers such as John Norris who writes at Pretty Sinister shows there are earlier examples such as Victor Luhrs’ The Longbow Murder (1941), which sees Richard the Lionheart as the detective protagonist and Auntie Beardie (1940) by Joseph Shearing, which is set in post-revolutionary France. Melville Davisson Post also wrote a series of historical mystery stories involving his sleuth Uncle Abner. He wrote these stories between 1911 and 1928 but they are set prior to the American Civil War.

When I saw the subtitle of this book, I did think thirty-three was a big number. Did Christie really use that many different ways to deceive us? So, part of me was not too surprised when I started noticing that some of the later chapters’ ideas had been covered by previous ones. This issue is reinforced by the fact that some examples from Christie’s work are repeated across chapters and are used to make a similar point. A conversation in Crooked House is one such example.

There were some points which interested me in this book though. The chronological approach in their third reads paid off in chapter 3, which is called ‘Plenty of Nothing – What appears to be valueless might be priceless’. It highlights the fact that Christie utilises this strategy with both Miss Marple and Poirot in two books which were published 9 months apart. In a later chapter there is also the interesting statistic that ‘there are cases of identity theft in about 60% of Christie’s novels.’ The idea that probably grabbed my attention the most was in chapter 18, ‘Sawing the clue in half: Placing the two halves of a single clue in different parts of the book’. In addition, the book does contain some unexpected humour: ‘Crofts was a railway engineer and his plots often involved the use of train timetables in providing elaborate alibis. Such alibis have fallen out of fashion in crime fiction, perhaps because modern British train timetables represent the triumph of hope over experience.’

Nevertheless, Agatha Christie: Plots, Clues and Misdirections ends weakly with more tangents. There is no moment of bringing all the threads together or drawing a final conclusion. I don’t feel this book adds much to the existing body of literature on Christie as a writer. Seasoned Christie readers are less likely to find new material and readers new to Christie are liable to have her work spoiled, if they have not already read all the books.

Rating: 2.5/5