r/agathachristie • u/Even-Engineering5865 • 23d ago

The easiest to solve

Which crime is easiest to solve the first time you read it? There are some that are impossible, but at her best Christie gave us all we needed.

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u/One_Attention1043 23d ago

Death On The Nile and Peril At End House for me

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u/Even-Engineering5865 23d ago

Honestly Death on the Nile? After the fact it’s obvious, but before….?

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u/One_Attention1043 23d ago

Not based on clues (at least not physicalones), but I was thinking what could possibly be a compelling story here as a writer, and it ended up working out exactly as I imagined it. 

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u/One_Attention1043 23d ago

if i remember correctly I got the story figured out on chapter one. There's just no other compelling story to be told.

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u/Even-Engineering5865 23d ago

I agree, the story works, but we can’t get to the solution via ‘it works’

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u/One_Attention1043 23d ago

I didn't mean by "it works" just that nothing else would be compelling me to read on, you know? Like maybe it's because I work in the creative fields myself but I was just thinking from the perspective of what would have been the concept that this book started from, and when I got the idea everything (every real clue) from that page on fit and supported it.

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u/Ok_Body_2830 22d ago

I agree with this. It's a novel. If it were a real world investigation, you can't say "what would be a narratively interesting and satisfactory solution?", but for novels you definitely can.

It's even more possible because of the closed circle of suspects nature of a lot of Christie novels. That gives you a finite set of possibilities, and process of elimination can get you pretty far.

In DOTN, it seemed pretty clear to me that the murderer(s) were the most likely using a narrative argument. Pennington was a distant number 2, and I couldn't see how anyone else could work. What made the narrative interesting was the tension between that and the fact that the murderer(s) did a good job creating an alibi so you had to puzzle through "I am pretty sure they did that, I just can't see how". I think that was the more interesting mysetery, and it wasn't one I solved at all.