Murder, She Wrote: Me and Agatha Christie

I'm obsessed with murder. Nothing gets me more than a gripping whodunit, a murder mystery that takes us from corpse to culprit with all the swiftness that a good, juicy offing should have. Why are murder mysteries so ghoulishly fun anyway?

When I was ten, my parents took me to see Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap in Toronto, which is the longest running play in theater history in its London incarnation. And from then, trapped I was. I can't say I've read Christie's oeuvre, but I'd wager on twenty out of her eighty detective novels. It's hard to remember exactly which ones. Most are works of instant thrills, to be read on pins and needles amid the guns and daggers. She hardly ever strays from a tried and true formula: we meet the cast, one meets an untimely demise, and in swoops the detective for interrogations, clues, epiphanies, and the explication. None of her mysteries are left unsolved. That wouldn't be very British of her.

Like afternoon tea, Christie's books feel punctual. The train to murder takes off and arrives exactly on schedule, with all loose ends tidied up and no lingering sentiments except discouragement that, once again, we've been bested. I have never successfully deduced the solution to the crime, which is precisely how the author intended. But reading more of her novels helps understand their structure, the frequent fake-outs, which details will resurface as clues for Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple.

The murder mystery that's most rewarding, I find, is the most lighthearted. The more disconnected our emotions are from the murder, the more potential arises for comedy and social critique. Perhaps this is why I prefer Agatha Christie to the endless CSI and Law and Order gristmill. At least Dame Agatha has fun, writing with the panache of Julia Child frosting a cake.

The urban crime dramas that flood television these days take murder so seriously. Their victims often deal with abuse and sexual crimes; the solution becomes faux-technical, favoring lab inventory over invention. Even the detectives by season ten will face hardship in their own lives. Hercule Poirot, on the other hand, remains as infallible as his mustache. The Christie novels--and often their adaptations--are comedies of manners. Sidney Lumet, who directed the 1974 adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, even said he took on the murderous script because he wanted something gay.

Note: Spoilers ahead.

Christie's most-remembered murders tend to have exceptional conclusions. Though the butler done it (or some equally incidental character) in some, this isn't always the case. The title of And Then There Were None rings true. All ten visitors to Indian Island die, even the murderer. Only a treatise in a bottle reveals how he did it. In Murder on the Orient Express, Hercule Poirot unveils that all twelve passengers plotted together to kill their victim, and all go free when he elects not to tell the police. Or try Curtain, the final Hercule Poirot novel, in which the detective reveals postmortem that he was the killer. Then there's Witness for the Prosecution, a short story later turned into a play and Billy Wilder's 1957 film, probably the strongest case for the Dame on film. The man accused, then set free by the court, turns out to be the murderer after all.

Double bluffs aside, Agatha Christie never escaped the conventions she set. Nor did she seem to want to. Her experiments with point of view, for instance (as in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The A.B.C. Murders), are just another layer of frosting, a ganache to complement a meticulous recipe. Each clue is measured precisely, even if some are sprinkled in at the last moment. After Joan Acocella's essay in The New Yorker, I read Death on the Nile this week and felt cheated that Hercule Poirot never mentioned a second bullet hole until he revealed the solution. But that didn't stop me from reading on. Despite common tropes of the genre and functional writing, her cheeky determination to outsmart us all impresses. Maybe this time, I always think as I sink into the next one...