August Books 1) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie

[nwhyte]

I remember when I first read this, a third of a century ago, and my shock at the twist ending, one of the best ever executed in crime literature. I reread it last week, for the first time since then, assessing whether Christie is "fair"; is the solution pulled out of thin air for gratuitous effect? Or are there in fact clues that the alert reader

Comments

[seawasp]

Holmes has a couple of others; poison darts in The Sign of the Four, for instance, and poison vapor in The Adventure of the Devil's Foot, for instance.

[geekette8]

Does "The Speckled Band" count as poison?

[seawasp]

Technically that's an envenomation rather than poisoning, and the weapon isn't the poison, it's a living animal that happens to envenomate people, so I think that's probably stretching it a bit.

[filigree10]

I think poison was actually a fairly fashionable method of murder in 1920s and 1930s mystery fiction: Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and and Margery Allingham all had some fairly complicated poison plots. For Christie, I think it was at least partly a case of 'write what you know', since she worked as a hospital dispenser during World War I and was presumably very familiar with the possibilities of the prescribed drugs of the time.

[londonkds]

There were also quite a number of high-profile poisoning cases during the era: Crippen, Herbert Armstrong, the unsolved Sidney/Duff case...

[nojay]

Have you read the D'Arcy murder-mystery stories by Randall Garrett? They often pastiche Christie plots -- "The Murder on the Napoli Express" is a given considering the title but other stories also have Christie-type plots woven into the well-developed alt-hist setting. It also helps to read the D'Arcy stories if you like puns and in-jokes.

[gareth_rees]

George Orwell, in "Decline of the English Murder", was astute about the buttons being pushed in these ‘cosy’ murder mysteries:With all this in mind one can construct what would be, from a News of the World reader's point of view, the ‘perfect’ murder. The murderer should be a little man of the professional class - a dentist or a solicitor, say - living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate. He should go astray through cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man, and should only bring himself to the point of murder after long and terrible wrestles with his conscience. Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison