Christie for Christmas

Desperate for more Agatha Christie? Now there are two "new" mysteries by the late queen of clues.

By Jacqueline Carey

Dec 23, 1999 | I hate clues. Too many people -- including crime writers -- think mystery novels are supposed to be built around clues, as if the ideal were some Encyclopedia Brown exercise inflated to grown-up size. (Encyclopedia Brown, the hero of the children's detective series, solves non-gory crimes by pointing out the inconsistencies in the guilty person's statement -- e.g., "With the sun in his face, Ringo Charlie's shadow would have fallen behind him!")

I do not like trying to figure out whether an author's mistakes are deliberate or not. I do not like timetables or floor plans. I do not want to have to pay attention to who calls whom what, where who was when or who knew what too soon. That is the author's job, and I do not feel like doing it for the author. I do not want my mysteries to feel like work.

Besides, you have to suspend so much disbelief to read a mystery novel that picking apart minor breaks in logic threatens to topple the whole edifice. (See Raymond Chandler's much-quoted, perfectly just yet irrelevant objection to one of Agatha Christie's solutions: so ingenious that "only a half-wit could guess it.")

Christie, like the other Golden Age detective novelists, is supposed to be good at clues. You know the drill: a genteel setting, a limited cast, a few pretty corpses and a final gathering of suspects at which the detective explains how the indentation in the corner of the rug led him to the murderer. In truth, the best Christies follow this pattern in only the most superficial sense. They do not depend on clues but on perfectly fair conjurer's tricks: Christie is an absolute genius at making you look elsewhere while the answer is right there in plain sight. That is one reason she is still read eagerly today while contemporaries like Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham are largely forgotten.

Christie's many fans were no doubt happy to learn that the writer, who died in 1976, has in the past two years started to publish anew. This return is thanks to Charles Osborne, a literary jack-of-all-trades, who has turned two of her plays into novels. The results are mixed. His efforts are certainly more successful than Robert Goldsborough's attempts to channel the dead Rex Stout -- the dialogue and structure are, after all, Christie's -- but there are difficulties in such a literal translation of a play. It is extremely odd to read an entire novel without modernist literary pretensions that is set in a single room. The prose sandwiched between the dialogue often reads like stage directions. And some of it will make your eyes roll back in your head.

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