Halfway through my college career, I spent a summer in a house chockablock with Agatha Christie novels. Without access to a library or bookstore, and this being well before the days of ebooks, my voracious need to read was met by the Christie canon.
I have two distinct memories of that binge. First, that I loved Third Girl. Turns out, upon rereading it recently, the book I was remembering was not in fact Third Girl but The Pale Horse, which holds up in quality to memory’s halo. Third Girl does not.
The second memory I have is that Agatha relied on what I termed “the second wife in Dorchester” trope far too often. Secret bigamy felt like a violation of the fair play rules of the classic puzzle mystery. Turns out this memory is also false: I’ve found only three instances of secret bigamy in my recent effort to read every single one of her sixty-six novels.
Let us pass over in silence, for now, the anxiety and despair prompted by such false memories, especially (and ironically) where murder and justice are concerned.
Why this recent return to an author that I remembered as cheating her readers? As most enjoyable things in life, it unfolded through a seemingly random turn of events.
Husband introduces self to podcasts > self finds “The Allusionist” > self eventually tires of “The Allusionist” but not before hearing episode with podcaster Caroline Crampton of “Shedunnit” > self becomes addicted to “Shedunnit” > self rereads all of Dorothy L. Sayers’s mystery novels which never suffered reputationally with self > self runs out of Sayers novels and is sad > self listens to Shedunnit episode with podcasters of “All About Agatha” and their project to read everything Christie ever wrote > self decides to cope with limited access to books in Japan + pandemic-induced loneliness by also reading every novel Christie ever wrote + bingeing backlist of “All About Agatha.”
On 16 January 2022 I officially completed my read of all of Agatha Christie’s 66 novels. This includes the ones that are technically more thriller than mystery; it does not include her Mary Westmacott novels which are neither; nor does it include the short stories; and I didn’t reread ones that I actually remembered having read before. And yes, of course, I have enjoyed the David Suchet adaptations (though not quite all of them—yet).
Let’s be clear: Agatha Christie is no Dorothy Sayers. But then, you don’t read Christie for the same reasons you read Sayers, even though they are both detective fiction authors. Sayers is by turns lavish, abundant, fervid to the point of hilarity, meditative, poetic, supremely moral without a whiff of moralism, and complex. Christie is spare, lean, swift, and tricky. Sayers colors in her fabulous mosaics; Christie sketches in charcoal pencil. Both are skillful artisans, but you’d never turn to one when what you wanted was the other. I wonder if my misremembering of Christie had something to do with discovering Sayers in the meanwhile.
Anyway, thanks to Catherine Brobeck (may she rest in peace) and Kemper Donovan of the “All About Agatha” podcast, I learned to track if not exactly the clues then the habits in Christie’s writing. For all that, I think I guessed the murderer correctly (and for the correct reasons, not randomly) only about five times in all. Her craft is unparalleled and hard to penetrate even once you’ve learned the tricks of her trade.
But I also did this reading binge while composing and editing a couple novels of my own, and in time, I had a realization.
Which you already know, because it’s the title of this post:
Every Novel Is a Mystery Novel.
This is the case whether the premise is, “So-and-so was leading an ordinary life. Little did she know that dark secrets in her family’s past were bubbling up to haunt her…” or if it simply launches right into action and never slows down. A satisfying novel might well circle back to the beginning for a golden inclusio, but never gives away just how the clasp will be fastened. There is always a mystery to be revealed—otherwise there would be no story to tell.
I surmise that one of the reasons we all love mystery novels so much is that the authors thereof have no choice but to focus their attention on the mystery and its unraveling, whereas authors of genres with less obvious mysteries can easily get sidetracked and lose our attention, or set us up for all all-too-obvious ending.
As a writer, I learned these three essential writing insights for all genres from my Christie binge.
1. Plant clues. You don’t need a murder or a detective to have clues. Our entire lives are spent sniffing out clues about how to live, what things means, why he’s behaving that way, what she isn’t saying, where they went last weekend. Life is also full of red herrings. We don’t know in advance any better than a detective which is which. A satisfying read in any genre presents clues to the ultimate solution the protagonist is seeking—whether the solution is existential or practical—but without flagging them too obviously. The reader enjoys working to figure it out right alongside the protagonist. (Or maybe shouting at the protagonist to pay attention to things that she’s ignoring but shouldn’t.)
2. Misdirect. This means, in part, mixing in red herrings with your clues. But it also means distracting the readers’ attention so they expect one thing and therefore can be surprised by what actually happens. Surprise is the one really essential quality in a story, but it’s hard to do it without cheating, being affected or outrageous for its own sake, or departing altogether from story conventions. It’s true: there’s a relatively limited number of stories out there. It’s the changing up of the details that hooks us again and again. Misdirection allows you to give your reader the gift of surprise without cheating or abandoning true Story alogether. Misdirection sees to it that your surprise is really a surprise, but still we believe its inevitability. Hence point 3…
3. Tie it all together surprisingly but satisfyingly. Aristotle said it first: the conclusion of any story must be both surprising and inevitable. Surprise is no good if it is not inevitable from all the clues you’ve laid down before—this is why misdirection is your friend and helps you avoid cheating. But we absolutely must have a satisfying ending. That doesn’t mean all existential or personal questions are solved forever. But even open-ended endings solve what they’ve set out to solve in the course of the book. Nothing is more aggravating than a mystery novel that doesn’t do this. “But, but, what about the floppy blue hat they found in the train’s dining car?!” “But, but, couldn’t she just have called him and asked him about the note in his mackintosh pocket?” Same goes for any other novel. A novel has to end, not just stop. Its own self-imposed mystery must be solved, even if that opens up three more mysteries in the process.