voice and mannish figure; still, when someone impersonates Arthur Inglethorp, the reader assumes that the impostor is a male.

The reader is not likely to make much of the fact that Evelyn Howard’s father was a doctor or pay attention when Mary Cavendish says that her mother died of accidental poisoning from a medicine she was taking, even though Mrs. Inglethorp has been using a tonic containing strychnine. When Evelyn Howard finds the brown paper used to wrap a parcel containing a false beard, one assumes that she has fulfilled Poirot’s expectations of her abilities. Since Poirot has taken her into his confidence, one hardly suspects that she is involved in the murder. Moreover, she seems too straightforward and blunt, too likable and reliable to be guilty.

Her cousin Arthur Inglethorp, on the other hand, seems too obviously the killer; even the dull-witted Hastings suspects him, and Hastings’s suspicion should be enough to exonerate anyone. Inglethorp has an obvious motive—money—and is supposedly having an affair with another woman. Before leaving Styles early in the novel, Evelyn Howard further implicates him by telling Hastings to be especially wary of Mr. Inglethorp. Given all these clues, no one familiar with the conventions of the genre would regard him as the criminal. Any lingering doubt, moreover, seems removed when Poirot remarks that considering Mrs. Inglethorp’s kindness to the Belgian refugees, he would not allow her husband, whom she clearly loved, to be arrested now. One presumes that Poirot means that he is now sure that Arthur Inglethorp is innocent, though in fact the detective simply means “now,” before the case against Inglethorp is complete.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles tricks the reader not only by making the most likely and least likely suspects both guilty of the crime but also by introducing many false leads. Dr. Bauerstein, a London toxicologist, unexpectedly appears at Styles on the night of the murder and is found very early the next morning walking, fully dressed, in front of the gates to the manor. Why does Lawrence Cavendish, Mrs. Inglethorp’s son by her previous marriage, persist in maintaining that death was accidental? Why does Mary Cavendish cry out, when she learns that her mother-in-law has been poisoned, “No, no—not that—not that!” Why does she claim to have heard sounds in Mrs. Inglethorp’s room when she could not possibly have heard them? What is one to make of the strychnine in John Cavendish’s drawer or of Lawrence Cavendish’s fingerprints on another bottle of the poison?

Typical, too, is the focus on the solution rather than the crime. Although Christie presents an account of Mrs. Inglethorp’s final convulsions, the details are not gruesome because the description is sanitized. In most of Christie’s subsequent works, the murders occur offstage; significantly, the word “murder” itself does not often appear in her titles, particularly not in the titles that she, as opposed to her American publishers, chose. The reader’s reaction to her crimes is therefore not “How terrible!” but “Who did it? How? Why?” Like Christie’s detectives, the reader embarks on an intellectual quest to solve an intricate puzzle, not an emotional journey of revenge or purgation.

Red Herrings and Plain Evidence

Christie often allows the reader to engage in self-deceit. In The Body in the Library (1942), the clues are again so plain that one dismisses them as red herrings. In The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), the obvious suspects confess quite early, much to Jane Marple’s surprise. The reader assumes that she believes that someone else is the actual culprit and so dismisses the admissions of guilt. Actually, Miss Marple is merely perplexed that two people who worked so hard to create an alibi should give themselves up voluntarily. One would not expect the police officer in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1939) to be the murderer any more than one would suspect Lettitia Blacklock, the apparent target of at least two murder attempts, of being the killer in A Murder Is Announced.

In each case, Christie presents the evidence; Dora Bunner, for example, often says “Lotty” instead of “Letty,” a clear indication that Lettitia Blacklock is someone else. Yet the reader will dismiss these slips as signs of Dora Bunner’s absentmindedness. Christie’s most notable adaptations of conventional plotting appear in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the sympathetic narrator—who, like Evelyn Howard, seems to be in league with Poirot—turns out to be the killer, in Murder on the Orient Express (1934), in which all the suspects are in fact guilty, and in Ten Little Niggers (1939; also known as And Then There Were None), where all the suspects are victims.

Ordeal by Innocence

At {I} the same time that the crime itself is presented dispassionately, Christie recognizes its effect on the innocent. Cynthia Murdock and Lawrence Cavendish cannot be happy together as long as each secretly suspects the other of Mrs. Inglethorp’s murder. The Argyle family (Ordeal by Innocence, 1958) is not pleased to learn that John Argyle did not kill his mother, for if John is not guilty, another family member must be, and no one can be trusted until the actual culprit is identified.

Such considerations are about as philosophical as Christie gets, though. For her the story is all; philosophy and psychology never go beyond the obvious. Much of the appeal of Christie’s work lies in this very superficiality. Just as one needs no special knowledge of mysterious poisons or English bell-ringing rituals to solve her crimes, so to understand her criminals’ motives one need not look beyond greed, hate, or love.

Characterization

Characterization is similarly simple, again not to detract from the story. Mr. Wells, the attorney in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, is presented as “a pleasant man of middle-age, with keen eyes, and the typical lawyer’s mouth.” Lawrence Cavendish looks “about forty, very dark with a melancholy clean-shaven face.” Caroline Sheppard, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, hints that her brother is “weak as water,” but one does not otherwise get that impression of him.

Even Christie’s most fully realized characters remain in many ways ambiguous. Readers were surprised to learn, for example, that Jane Marple is tall; the fact emerges rather late in the novels about her. So, too, Poirot, though seemingly minutely described, is in some ways enigmatic. There is, for example, the mystery about his age: If he retired from the Belgian police force in 1904, he should be about eighty by the time of Mrs. Inglethorp’s death and 130 by the time of his own. His head is egg-shaped, but which way does the egg lie (or stand)? Exactly what are military mustaches? Christie cultivated this ambiguity, objecting to a dust jacket that showed so much as Poirot’s striped pants and shoes. She preferred to allow readers to supply the details from their own experience or imagination.

Universality

Even the English village that she made particularly her own milieu for murder is but roughly sketched. Christie can offer detailed floor plans or maps when this information is necessary, but Wychwood (Murder Is Easy, 1939) might easily be Jane Marple’s St. Mary Mead or Styles St. Mary:Wychwood . . . consists mainly of its one principal street. There were shops, small Georgian houses, prim and aristocratic, with whitened steps and polished knockers, there were picturesque cottages with flower gardens. There was an inn, the Bells and Motley, standing a little back from the street. There was a village green and a duck pond, and presiding over them a dignified Georgian house.

This easy transferability of her settings applies even to her most exotic locales; Mesopotamia seems no more foreign than Chipping Cleghorn.

The lack of specific detail has given her works timelessness as well as universality. Speaking of Death Comes as the End (1944), set in the Egypt of the Eleventh Dynasty, Christie observed, “People are the same in whatever century they live, or where.” In keeping with the novel-of-manners tradition she does chronicle the life of the period: A Murder Is Announced shows how Britishers attempted to cope with post-World War II hardships through barter and the black market, with children who read The Daily Worker, with social changes that brought the breakup of the old manors and caused servants to disappear, and with new technology such as central heating. A decade later, St. Mary Mead has a new housing development, and Gossington Hall gets new bathrooms (The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, 1962). Such changes are, however, superficial. As Christie writes, “The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different, . . . the clothes were different, but the human beings were the same as they had always been.”

If live-in maids have vanished, a part-time cleaning person will serve as well to keep a house tidy and a plot complicated. Though the village is no longer the closed world it once was, all the suspects can still fit into the Blacklock drawing room or the dining room of Bertram’s Hotel. The real action in Christie’s works occurs within the reader’s mind while sorting real clues from false, innocent characters from guilty. As long as people enjoy such intellectual games, Christie’s books will endure, for, with her masterful talent to deceive, she has created highly absorbing puzzles. She will always be the first lady of crime.