The New Yorker:

How Agatha Christie created the modern murder mystery.

By Joan Acocella 

They are assembled—maybe eight or nine people—in a small place: a snowbound train, a girls’ school, an English country house. Then—oh no! A body drops. Who did this? And why, and how? Among those gathered, or soon summoned, is a detective, who says that no one should leave, please. He then begins questioning the people concerned, one by one. In the end, he collects all the interested parties and delivers the “revelation”: he names the murderer and the motive and the method. Almost never does the culprit protest. Occasionally, he goes off and commits suicide, but as a rule he confesses (“God rot his soul in Hell! I’m glad I did it!”) and exits quietly, under police escort. Anyone who has ever seen a Charlie Chan movie, or played Clue, or, indeed, read a detective story of the past half century will recognize this scenario, created by Agatha Christie, the so-called Queen of Crime, in the nineteen-twenties.

The detective story was invented by Edgar Allan Poe, though he wrote only four of them before he lost interest. Other writers picked up where he left off, but the first “career” practitioner of the genre who is still important to us today is Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes series appeared from 1887 to 1927. By Christie’s time, at least two conventions had been established. First was the detective’s eccentricity. (Holmes, when he is not chasing a criminal, lies on his couch, felled by boredom and cocaine, shooting bullets into the wall of his study.) A second rule was the absolutely central role of ratiocination. The detective, when he is working, shows almost no emotion. What he shows—and what constitutes the main pleasure of the stories—is inductive reasoning.

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