the bad, and ensures that every book published under the Crime Club mark is a clean and intriguing example of this class of literature. Crime Club books are not mere thrillers. They are restricted to works in which there is a definite crime problem, an honest detective process, with a credible and logical solution. Members of the Crime Club receive the Crime Club News issued at intervals.
As this suggests, not for nothing was the 1930s known as the Golden Age of detective fiction, an era during which the creation and enjoyment of a detective story was a serious business for reader, writer and publisher. All three took the elaborate conventions seriously. The civilised outrage that followed the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1926 showed what a serious breach of the rules its solution was considered at the time. So, while in many ways observing the so-called ‘rules’, and consolidating the image of a safe, cosy and comforting type of fiction, Agatha Christie also constantly challenged those ‘rules’ and, by regularly and mischievously tweaking, bending, and breaking them, subverted the expectations of her readers and critics. She was both the mould creator and mould breaker, who delighted in effectively saying to her fans, ‘Here is the comforting read that you expect when you pick up my new book but because I respect your intelligence and my own professionalism, I intend to fool you.’
But how did she fool her readers while at the same time retaining her vice-like grip on their admiration and loyalty? In order to understand how she managed this feat it is necessary to take a closer look at ‘The Rules’.
THE RULES OF DETECTIVE FICTION – POE, KNOX, VAN DINE
Edgar Allan Poe: inventor of the detective story
In April 1841 the American periodical Graham’s Magazine published Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and introduced a new literary form, the detective story. The unwritten ground-rules that distinguish detective fiction from other forms of crime writing – the thriller, the suspense story, the mystery story – were established in five Poe short stories. He pioneered:
All of Poe’s pioneering initiatives were exploited by subsequent generations of crime writers and although many of those writers introduced variations on, and combinations of, them, no other writer ever established so many influential concepts. Christie, as we shall see, exploited them to the full.
The first, and most important, of the Poe stories, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, incorporated the first five ideas above. The murder of a mother and daughter in a room locked from the inside is investigated by Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, who, by logical deduction, arrives at a most unexpected solution, thereby proving the innocence of an arrested man; the story is narrated by his unnamed associate.
Although Poe is not one of the writers she mentions in An Autobiography as being an influence, Agatha Christie took his template of a murder and its investigation when she began to write The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 75 years later.
The brilliant amateur detective
If we take ‘amateur’ to mean someone outside the official police force, then Hercule Poirot is the pre-eminent example. With the creation of Miss Marple, Christie remains the only writer to create two famous detective figures. Although not as well known, the characters Tommy and Tuppence, Parker Pyne, Mr Satterthwaite and Mr Quin also come into this category.
The less-than-brilliant narrator-friend
Poirot’s early chronicler, Captain Arthur Hastings, appeared in nine novels (if we include the 1927 episodic novel The Big Four) and 26 short stories. After Dumb Witness in 1937, Christie dispensed with his services, though she allowed him a nostalgic swan song in Curtain, published in 1975. But she also experimented with other narrators, often with dramatic results: The Man in the Brown Suit, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Endless Night. The decision to send Hastings to Argentina may have had less to do with his mental ability than with the restrictions he imposed on his creator: his narration meant that only events at which he was present could be recounted. Signs of this growing unease can be seen in the use of third-person narrative at the beginning of Dumb Witness and intermittently throughout The ABC Murders, published the year before Hastings’ banishment. Miss Marple has no permanent Hastings-like companion.
The wrongly suspected person
This is the basis of some of Christie’s finest titles, among them the novels Five Little Pigs, Sad Cypress, Mrs McGinty’s Dead and Ordeal by Innocence, and the short story ‘The Witness for the Prosecution’.
The sealed room
The fascination with this ploy lies in the seeming impossibility of the crime. Not only has the detective – and the reader – to work out ‘Who’ but also ‘How’. The crime may be committed in a room with all the doors and windows locked from the inside, making the murderer’s escape seemingly impossible; or in a room that is under constant observation; or the corpse may be discovered
