Things that don't make sense in Agatha Christie

She always pulls out some extraneous bit of information at the end to solve the crime, that the reader had no prior knowledge of.

"Isn't the killer concerned the victim will just blab (as threatened) in the intervening weeks?"

How should I know? What am I? Psychic?

Is the killer concerned? Like we're friends or something. Hanging out at the coffee shop, just chatting away about a long con murder scheme.

Now my mother--she was the expert. People dropping like flies all around her and not a single suspicion. Listen, when I went to open up a box of Flaky Flix and saw the puncture wound on the wrapping, I just hit the road, then and there.

Didn't even pack. I already had the fake passport in my pocket. It was either a new me or a dead me or a dead new me. I was planning on that first one.

You know she staged her death at one point in order to lure me to her.

Like I'd fall for that amateur move.

She really thought I'd never paid attention.

Pretty sure she wound up in a potter's field somewhere. Not that I went to the site, but I dead get some pictures as proof.

Ah, Polaroids.

Please don't put spoilers in the original post, OP.

R3 sorry, I tried to be as vague as possible.

Can we think of others?

Yes r1 points out my problem with her books. The reader can’t solve the crime because we aren’t exposed to the major clues. The person solving the killings in her books seemingly finds clues out of nowhere when revealing them at the end

The one that stands out most for me is from one of the archaeological Poirot stories (sorry, I've forgotten which title, but it's probably best not to be too specific).

There was a woman who was married twice and was apparently too unobservant to notice that both husbands were the same man. If you can believe that, Poirot's explanation makes perfect sense, but who can believe that?

No one has even heard to Christie among the newer generations. She was the Jackie Collins of her time

R6 you're right, that almost ruined an otherwise great novel.

[quote]The reader can’t solve the crime because we aren’t exposed to the major clues. The person solving the killings in her books seemingly finds clues out of nowhere when revealing them at the end

There were lots of Murder She Wrote episodes like that.

And in the hilarious mystery spoof, Murder By Death, Truman Capote's character berates all the detectives for that.

In Lord Edgware dies, why did the killer not hire a hitman?

Why did the Duke of Merton propose to Jane Wilkinson when he knew she was divorcing and he was a strict Catholic?

In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, it’s impossible for the alleged killer to have carried it out in the way Poirot declares. Impossible.

At trial, s/he’d have been found not guilty.

R11 please elaborate.. Why not?

R11 please elaborate.. Why not?

R13 It’s to do with the timeline. Impossible for him/her to get where they need to be in order to carry out the murder.

There was an entire TV show devoted to this (in the UK). I re-read the book and they were right.

Another suspect (who could have done it & had a better motive) was put forward.

The TV show wondered whether AC knew that Poirot got it wrong....in which case the book with the most famous twist had an even bigger, hidden one.

(NB: I don’t think she knew - just made a mistake).

The show was called Agatha Christie vs Hercule Poirot & was on Sky Arts. Don’t know if this is findable online.

Spoiler!

I thought the killer was with the victim after dinner when he killed him? Then he set the dictaphone to make it appear Ackroyd was still alive?

He then arranged for a phone call so he could head back over to the scene to remove the dictaphone. Am I missing something?

R1, Not true at all. Every clue is there for the reader, quite unlike what happens in the Holmes stories, which ARE exactly as you describe.

R5, It has been my reading experience that every clue is available to, if initially unperceived by, the reader. Now I must request that you and r1 be specific as to novel or story. I have them all, so I promise to re-read and prove one of us incorrect.

R16 I can’t remember the exact details, tbh. I’ll watch the TV show now so come back in an hour & I’ll share the details.

Boring Saturday afternoon & it’s cold and rainy so I could use a re-watch.

R7, "The newer generations" have never even heard of Hemingway or Steinbeck, Updike or Pynchon, Dumas, Nabokov, Kafka, Wordsworth, Byron, or Chaucer. They are completely ignorant of literature, art, pre-2010 music, non-comic book movies, history, geography, etc.

So what's your point?

R19, A television version is not the written one. Christie cannot be faulted as an author for what media do to her works.

R19 thanks, I've never heard of this alternative theory before! It's rainy and dark here in London too!

R11

Pierre Bayard, literature professor and author, in Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? (Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?), re-investigates Agatha Christie's Ackroyd, proposing an alternative solution in another crime novel.

He argues in favour of a different murderer – Sheppard's sister, Caroline – and says Christie subconsciously knew who the real culprit is.

R11

Pierre Bayard, literature professor and author, in Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? (Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?), re-investigates Agatha Christie's Ackroyd, proposing an alternative solution in another crime novel.

He argues in favour of a different murderer – Sheppard's sister, Caroline – and says Christie subconsciously knew who the real culprit is.

R20, do you think most Baby Boomers sit around reading Pynchon and Byron? They don't, you're just a typical eldergay attacking young people for no reason. Who the fuck would lump Christie in with any of those other writers anyway?

And I'd disagree that younger people haven't heard of her. Her books are still being adapted for movies and tv.

I still haven't figured out how Hercule Poirot learned to speak Japanese.

The solution to the mystery in Murder on the Orient Express makes no sense

R27 why not?

R21 It’s not a “television version”. It’s a look at the crime (as detected by Poirot) as if it actually happened to see whether the solution is feasible.

It’s not because the timeline doesn’t make sense.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS (Please, if you haven’t read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd amd think you might, you really, really don’t want to read on).

So, according to Poirot...

Dr Shepherd murdered RA at 8.50. He then had to be at the Gate Lodge at 9pm on the dot to give the impression that he was just arriving. So that gives him 10 minutes to cover up his involvement and implicate Ralph Patton.

In that time he had to put on RP’s hobnail boots (stolen the night before from RP’s hotel room), walk around the study outside, go back in and leave more fake footprints, lock the door from the inside, go back out, change back into his own shoes, head over to the hotel to replace the boots and then get to the Gate House.

10 minutes is not enough time for this even if he ran to the hotel and back. In the show it was timed out as around 22 minutes.

Carrying around the dictaphone & boots in his doctor’s bag all day with no one noticing is not feasible either. In 1927, dictaphones were the size of typewriters. It would have been a struggle to fit in into a standard doctor’s bag plus the hobnail boots (presumably along with all his doctor bits).

This is enough for reasonable doubt in a court room.

The alternative suspect is Flora, Shepherd’s sister. It’s mentioned that if she had a crest it would be a mongoose. In Kipling’s stories, the mongoose kills to protect it’s family. She doesn’t have an alibi & is missing from Poirot’s denouement. Everyone else, except the parlour maid, has an alibi.

Finally, they make the point that when you have an unreliable narrator, you invoke the Liar’s Paradox. If Shepherd has been lying (if only by omission) throughout his narrative then we have absolutely no good reason to believe him when he implies that he’s the killer in his final paragraphs. He could have been protecting Flora, who killed to protect him.

Personally, I think if you plotted out all of Agatha Christie’s plots as if they were real world events most would have similar problems, but it’s fun to consider them anyway.

R25, Well, since I'm a Boomer who actually studied and taught most of those writers I noted (though my husband was the one here who read Pynchon)....

And FTR, I wasn't the one to say that young people haven't heard of AC. My larger point was that that alleged statistic would not be an anomaly.

R26, you can watch it on Dailymotion, but there are no English captions.

R30, if you are teaching literature then you hardly represent the typical boomer.

I think most of Dame Agatha's novels have a certain, "Let's fuck with the reader" quality. The murder is the narrator, a child, they all did it, the murderer didn't die when you thought he did, but did commit suicide through a process that makes a Rube Goldberg machine seem logical and efficient.

The one I really hate is the one where the body has been moved for really no good reason except to fuck with the reader.

R27, you didn't find it just a tad implausible?

R29 thanks for posting, does the book definitely state he only had 10 minutes?

I would point out readers demanded Christie for Christmas and she had to pull something out of her ass each year. I knew something was coming every time she tossed out a new set of honorifics.

Speaking of things that don't make sense, can we talk about Miss Marple? I love it when people get very dogmatic about which actress was the "correct" Miss Marple. The truth is her character is very inconsistent. The Miss Marple of 1927 is not the same as the Miss Marple in 1939 or 1979. Her age also doesn't add up. If her age in Bertam's Hotel is correct, that would make her 36 in 1927.

Clearly, Agatha Christie was not fond of the character. She writes Miss Marple stories sporadically except for 1960-65.

Hi, R37. In her autobiography Christie addressed the issue of her detectives and their ages.

It's funny to read, because she clearly rued the day she introduced Poirot as a retired detective. "If only I hadn't made him so old," she said. Then, she acknowledged making exactly the same mistake with Miss Marple. In her books, she mostly ignored their ages but, writing her own story, said that "they would both be well over 100 by now."

At least she didn't make him a Finn!

[quote]It has been my reading experience that every clue is available to, if initially unperceived by, the reader. Now I must request that you and R1 be specific as to novel or story.

"The Secret of Chimneys" has always bothered me a bit because there was something hidden. A plot point early in the book is the ambiguity about which window in the house a light appeared in late on the night of the murder. In the grand reveal, the witness announces that he had resolved that ambiguity some time earlier and knew which window it was. That fact was hidden from the reader until that reveal.

SPOILERS

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd timeline:

8:40 - Events inside the study.

8:50 - Sheppard leaves the study.

9:00 - Sheppard passes through the lodge gates heading home.

9:10 - Sheppard arrives home.

The crucial period is 8:50 to 9:00.

During that time, he:

- Leaves via the front door and runs to the summer house.

- Changes shoes and runs to the study window.

- Enters the study and locks the study door from the inside.

- Leaves the study and runs back to the summer house.

- Changes his shoes again and runs to the lodge gates.

The trip to the lodge gates from the front door at a normal walking pace takes five minutes. The summer house is close to the house, in the same corner as the study (see map), so it might be barely possible for him, particularly if had prepped the boots such that he could slip them on easily and had everything planned out in his mind so that there would be no hesitation.

[quote]In that time he had to put on RP’s hobnail boots (stolen the night before from RP’s hotel room), walk around the study outside, go back in and leave more fake footprints, lock the door from the inside, go back out, change back into his own shoes, head over to the hotel to replace the boots and then get to the Gate House.

He doesn't have to go to the hotel, nor does the book say that he did. He could just as easily slip quietly out of his home in the middle of the night to take care of returning the shoes. Christie left this point ambiguous.

In an early episode of David Suchet's Poirot, he goes on a cruise he enjoys it but then later in the series when he goes to Egypt he hates traveling by sea.

I love Agatha Christie , and I think she is better at leaving clues than a lot of other crime writers of the same period. Only she is very good at misdirecting.

For instance, SPOILER: at Halloween Party it is said at the beginning that the murder must have had his/her clothes wet after the murder (drowning of a teenager while apple bobbing, no less). When you get told soon after of someone having his/her clothes wet, you don’t notice because your attention is being pulled to another fact at the same time. she excelled at this.

Having said the above, and though it is one of my favorite of her books, no one in their right mind would execute the murder in Death on the Nile.

Why did Hastings open car doors etc for Poirot, like he was a lady?

Miss Poirot was a lady, and deserved to be treated as such!!!

[quote] Christie became increasingly tired of Poirot, much as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had grown weary of his character Sherlock Holmes. By the end of the 1930s, Christie wrote in her diary that she was finding Poirot "insufferable", and by the 1960s she felt that he was "an egocentric creep".[106

Love it

Look! Muriel chose that photo. It’s like the Gary Larson fuck you.

OP, re Cards On the Table, the victim was going to be going to India, so the killer could be sure that she wouldn’t have anyone to blab to for months.

Inge tv version, the killing is committed because the victim knows the killer is having a gay affair with her husband. Is it the same in the book?

The number of murderers and murder victims in St. Mary Mead likely surpasses the entire population of the village.

St. Mary Mead is the murder capital of the world.

We beg to differ.

Um, excuse moi

Well, r33, one does want a bit of originality, does one not?

R50, Not really. It is the behaviors of the inhabitants of St. Mary Mead that help Miss Marple solve the murders occurring elsewhere.

The cook who was late; the naive maid who was seduced and made pregnant by a rogue; the elder gent who re-wrote his Last Will and Testament; the twin sisters who liked to fool observers; etc.

I made those all up, but the point is that, when seeing similar behaviors away from home, Miss Marple has insight to "who done it."

In Hallowe'en Party - poorly reviewed but the mythological elements and the appearance of my all time favourite Agatha Christie chachter, Ariadne Oliver, make it a favourite - there is a dropped storyline which is implied a lesbian schoolteacher may be a murder victim. Do we ever find out what happened to her?

The implausibility of Miss Marple, always around where crimes are committed. No one ever told her to mind her own business and stay out of things.

R56 has a problem with recurring fictional crime-solvers.

Probably loves recurring Marvel super-heroes, though.

[quote]Having said the above, and though it is one of my favorite of her books, no one in their right mind would execute the murder in Death on the Nile.

Heh, that is the first thing I thought of when I read the thread title. Way too risky and involves - I'm trying to avoid spoilers here - involves a level of planning that seems very difficult if not impossible. A lot of her crimes were overly complex, because the books wouldn't have been as interesting otherwise.

As others have said, Christie almost always played fair. But she was very clever about obfuscating her clues. I recently reread A Murder is Announced, and when you already know the solution you start noticing her tricks. Her use of Dora Bunner, in particular, is very tricksy. Dora is a scatterbrained character who everyone dismisses, but *some* of what Dora says is very important. The trick is figuring out which are the important bits.

Incidentally, there weren't *that* many murders in St. Mary Mead. Only three of the Marple books are set there, and I believe they span a good many years.

Getting Marple on the spot was always a problem, and Christie didn't always pull it off elegantly or believably. Looking at you, Nemesis.

R48 it was a heterosexual affair in the book, but the change was very well done and wasn't jarring. Same with the added gay element in Five Little Pigs.

The gay elements added to Marple weren't nearly as well done.

[quote]I made those all up, but the point is that, when seeing similar behaviors away from home, Miss Marple has insight to "who done it."

"A Murder is Announced" has one of my favorite examples of that, though I'm not sure if it came from Christie's book or was just created for the TV version.

Anyway, Miss Marple thought that the murder victim reminded her of Fred Tyler, who worked in the fish shop in her village. "He was always adding an extra 1 to the shillings column," she said. "You know, very few people actually check their bills, and because of that, Fred was able to look them straight in the eye, smile very pleasantly, and steal enough money to take Jessie Spragg to the pictures and buy very loud ties."

And, sure enough, the hotel manager stated that there had been some financial irregularities surrounding murdered Rudy's interactions with guests.

R61 I don't think that's in the book. Miss Marple isn't staying at the spa or even meets Rudy in the novel, from what I remember.

Miss Marple's village parallels are well demonstrated and explained in The Thirteen Problems.

AC has many, MANY problems in her writing that have been noticed and mentioned many times, including right after the books were published. For example, she does the setup beautifully, puts in good red herrings, adds psychology... and in the end, the brilliant sleuth pulls the solution out of their arse, with a very lazy analysis of the rich clue history they have amassed. The only book she managed to not do a lazy ending was "Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None" where the solution is adequate to the buildup. No wonder that it's considered her masterpiece.

Her strength is in creating an elaborate setup that has the reader guessing all the time. That's why her short stories are AWFUL - she simply doesn't have the space to develop an adequate setup.

Also, she was so misogynistic/racist/antisemitic/homophobic/a huge CUNT that she could well have been an honorary DLer ;)

Every team who has adapted her work for the screen has applied an enormous amount of editing out the mistakes and inconsistencies. That's why the adaptations are usually better than the books. She is entertaining though, i have to give her that!

Thanks for the clarification, R62.

I watch the TV version frequently (it's my favorite of the Marples), but it's been some time since I last read the book.

R64 apologies, it seems Miss Marple was a guest of the Spa where Scherz worked.

R55, the lesbian character in "Hallowe'en Party" isn't killed. The character's name is Elizabeth Whittaker, and she's excellently cast with Finella Woolgar in the wonderful TV movie version on "Poirot." Plus, Zoe Wannamker is a delicious Ariadne Oliver, and thankfully did several episodes.

[quote]The gay elements added to Marple weren't nearly as well done.

The lesbian couple in "A Murder is Announced" is handled very well, in both versions (the Hickson and the McEwen) of it. But the Geraldine McEwen version has by far the better supporting cast, especially the Lettie/Lottie of Zoe Wannamaker. And Elaine Paige is sweet and dumb as Dora (two things Paige herself isn't).

Why didn't the killer murder Rudi in some out of the way place, unassociated with them?

Because that would have been no fun at all, r68.

[quote]I don't think that's in the book. Miss Marple isn't staying at the spa or even meets Rudy in the novel, from what I remember.

As you noted after this post, yes, she did stay there. She brought to the investigator's attention that Rudi had altered a check she had cashed at the front desk, skimming off the top just as her village parallel had done, and for the same reason: to impress the girl he was hanging out with.

That episode also served to highlight that Rudi wasn't all that bright, as Miss Marple was quite the wrong target for that kind of scam. An elderly woman of limited means counts every penny and has very firm habits as to how much money she cashes checks for on a regular basis.

Having read all of Christie and of Conan Doyle, I maintain that the latter's Holmes stories, while dazzling in showing the scope of Sherlock's knowledge and his powers of deduction, are yet inferior to the Christie oeuvre, which for the most part challenges the scope of OUR knowledge, specifically that of what we are reading!

OUR reading comprehension and knowledge** vs a character's unknowable store of information, font of many "monographs" to which we are not privy.

**E.g., the meanings of flowers. E.g., the color-changing trait of same. E.g., characters of certain classic novels. E.g., the Cyrillic alphabet. Etc.

I've got to wonder how recently some of you have read Christie. I've read a bunch of her books over the last couple of years and she doesn't usually pull stuff out of the air in the last chapter.

It's always the one you least suspect.

Knowing that ruins Christie books, plays, and movies for me. Within a few minutes, I can pick out the murderer.

r73, In another context, it's what my friend calls "Murder 101." In "Midsomer Murders," the killer is usually the character who is seen the least.

But that is not always the case with Christie. E.g., in "Evil Under the Sun" (I must assume all have at least seen a version), is the killer REALLY the "least suspected"? Or is it more a "HOW done it"?

Man, I've forgotten a lot of plots. Lucy, I have some reading to do! I think I'll start with the yammering Colonel who sees someone he didn't expect to....

I completely disagree, r73, in Agatha Christie the murderer is never the butler but always a main character of the story. She never did that thing that Ngaio Marsh or Margery Allingham (?) did of having a minor maid or secondary solicitor being the guilty party. What she did was give you reasons to discart them initially, mainly by providing alibis that turned out to be false.