[The puzzle mystery has] been brought to a high pitch of ingenuity in the stories of Agatha Christie. So I have read also the new Agatha Christie, Death Comes as the End, and I confess that I have been had by Mrs. Christie. I did not guess who the murderer was, I was incited to keep on and find out, and when I did finally find out, I was surprised. Yet I did not care for Agatha Christie and I hope never to read another of her books. I ought, perhaps, to discount the fact that "Death Comes as the End" is supposed to take place in Egypt two thousand years before Christ, so that the book has a flavor of Lloyd C. Douglas not, I understand, quite typical of the author …; but her writing is of a mawkishness and banality which seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters because they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader's suspicion…. Mrs. Christie, in proportion as she is more expert and concentrates more narrowly on the puzzle, has to eliminate human interest completely, or rather fill in the picture with what seems to me a distasteful parody of it. In this new novel she has to provide herself with puppets who will be good for three stages of suspense: you must first wonder who is going to be murdered, you must then wonder who is committing the murders, and you must finally be unable to foresee which of two men the heroine will marry. It is all like a sleight-of-hand trick, in which the magician diverts your attention from the awkward or irrelevant movements that conceal the manipulation of the cards, and it may mildly amuse and amaze you, as such a sleight-of-hand performance may. But in a performance like Death Comes as the End, the patter is a constant bore and the properties lack the elegance of playing cards. (pp. 234-35)

[Miss Mary Westmacott] studies men in their singularity [in The Rose and the Yew Tree]; she is concerned with the diversity of their lives. Her point is that the diversity is radical; the rose and the yew tree have different patterns but, in Mr. T. S. Eliot's words, their moments are of equal duration, because the patterns are complete. One cannot be measured against the other. Success and failure are relative terms, and the nature of each individual person to whom we apply them is unique. Thus stated, the argument recalls M. [Jean-Paul] Sartre, but the tale which supports is suggests, in its technical aspect, the influence of Mr. Somerset Maugham. Miss Westmacott writes crisply and is always lucid. (p. 621)

The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1968; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), November 6, 1948.