The Whodunit as Riddle: Block Elements in Agatha Christie

Author(s): Eliot A. Singer

Source: Western Folklore, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Jul., 1984), pp. 157-171
Published by: Western States Folklore Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1499897
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The Whodunit as Riddle:

Block Elements in Agatha Christie
ELIOT A. SINGER

To my utter amazement and, I must admit, somewhat to my

disgust, Poirot began suddenly to shake with laughter. He shook and

he shook. Something was evidently causing him the most exquisite

mirth.

"What the devil are you laughing at?" I said sharply.

"Oh! Oh! Oh!" gasped Poirot. "It is nothing. It is that I think of
a riddle I hear the other day. I will tell it to you. What is it that has two

legs, feathers, and barks like a dog?"

"A chicken, of course," I said wearily. "I knew that in the
nursery."
"You are too well informed, Hastings. You should say, 'I do not
know.' And then me, I say, 'A chicken,' and then you say, 'But a
chicken does not bark like a dog,' and I say, 'Ah! I just put that in to
make it more difficult.' Supposing, Hastings, that there we have the

explanation . . .1

In calling attention to a shared enigmatic quality, the analogy

whodunit to riddle is such a commonplace that it is almost more a
synonym than a cliche. Yet analogy is never a substitute for analysis,

and the very obviousness of this equation has seemed to mask the extent to which the riddle can provide real clues to the structure of the
whodunit. Many traditional speech genres present distillations of fundamental literary devices.2 In more complex literary constructions,
even in a popular culture form like the mystery, the combination of
such devices often covers up the simplicity of the devices themselves.
Thus, by carefully considering the construction of folkloric forms, it
An earlier version of this paper was read at the 1983 Meeting of the American Folklore Society in Nashville.
1. Agatha Christie, Thirteen at Dinner (New York, 1933). The quote is taken from the Dell

paperback edition (1982), pp. 198-199.

2. For an extensive discussion of speech genre structures as paradigms for literary devices,
see Susan Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (Baltimore, 1979).

157

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often becomes possible to uncover devices that are essential to literature

but concealed in it. This essay suggests that by taking seriously the
notion of the whodunit as riddle, that is by applying those devices
utilized in riddling strategies to this type of mystery, it becomes both

possible and necessary to reconsider the basic nature of whodunit

construction.

Riddling is a form of social interaction that involves an asymmetric

power relationship. The poser of the enigma maintains the right to impose a pre-determined solution. Alternative solutions, even if cleverer
than that of the poser, are automatically rejected as incorrect. Like-

wise, in the whodunit, the writer is the authoritative source. The

murderer is whomever the author, not the reader, chooses it to be. But
this asymmetry is not institutionalized; it is a product of choice within

the social interaction itself. The hearer or reader also retains a degree
of power, albeit of a higher logical type. He or she may interupt, walk
away, throw a book into the fire, ruin the author's livelihood by refusing to buy another, or hypothetically, even murder the perpetrator for
a particularly annoying solution. The poser of the enigma is omnipotent at the whim of the posee, and that whim lasts only so long as the
solutions are satisfying. The aesthetics of the mystery is that of rationality rather than of morality or sentiment; as Roger Caillois has

said, "What the reader demands is that [someone] with believable

human motives pull off a crime that seems to defy reason but that

reason can eventually uncover."3 Thus, a satisfactory solution to a

mystery, must be acceptable as rationally superior to those alternatives
that the reader has conceived.

The dominant conception among both critics and other readers is

that reading a whodunit is an almost pure hermeneutic exercise in
which bits of conflicting information are given the reader to enable him

or her to arrive at a solution through systematic analysis.4 (This is why

the genre is a favored paradigm for much recent reader-centered

literary theory.) In Kermode's words, "The narrative is ideally re3. Roger Caillois, "The Detective Novel as Game," in Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and
Literary Theory, eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe (New York, 1983), p. 9. See also
Michael Holquist, "Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in PostWar Fiction," New Literary History 3 (1971): 135-156.
4. A number of recent authors have used the mystery as a metaphor for the hermeneutic process of reading in general, a topic of considerable interest in contemporary literary theory. See,
for instance, Frank Kermode, "Novel and Narrative" and William W. Stowe, "From Semiotics
to Hermeneutics: Modes of Detection in Doyle and Chandler, " both in The Poetics of Murder,

pp. 175-196 and pp. 366-384.

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THE WHODUNIT AS RIDDLE 159

quired to provide, by various enigmatic clues, all the evidence concern-

ing the true character of [the murder] that the investigator and the
reader require to reconstruct [it].''5 The reader and the story detective, then, are expected to follow the same hermeneutic procedure,
sorting through true and false clues and eschewing "red herrings" in
order to discover a coherent pattern.
Riddle scholars often refer to solutions as being "arbitrary," and

as any experienced reader can attest, in reading a whodunit, it is

almost always possible to conceive of several rational solutions that account for at least the most crucial disparate clues. Most whodunits suggest numerous incorrect solutions in the course of the telling, and while

these are rejected because of incongruous elements, it takes little imag-

ination to by-pass these incongruities. As parodies like the film Sleuth

imply by giving and then dismissing alternative solutions without even
bothering to falsify them, in many whodunits the reason why a subse-

quent solution takes precedence over an earlier one has to do with

its temporal placement, not its superior logic; the final solution is
merely the last one. Such solutions are indeed arbitrary. But whodunits whose murderers are arbitrary choices no better than the reader's
suspects do not provide satisfactory reading experiences, and their

authors cannot expect to achieve consistent popularity unless, like

Dorothy Sayers or Peter Dickinson, their writing is satisfying for
reasons other than the mystery.
Of all the authors of the true whodunit,6 Agatha Christie, as is
evidenced by her popularity in volume and over time, has had the
greatest success in satisfying her readership. The key to this success
lies in the non-arbitrariness of most of her solutions. Contrary to the
common practice of whodunit writers, which, as Haycraft points out,

goes back to Poe, Agatha Christie's murderers are not "the least
likely. "7 Nor are they taken at random from the list of suspects. Rather,

more often than not, they are the most likely-husbands, wives, lovers,

relatives, or others with clear cut motives of gain or vengeance-that

is, murderers much like those in real life. As Miss Marple explains
in The Moving Finger, "Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple
5. Kermode, p. 180.
6. Todorov distinguishes the true whodunit from other forms of detective fiction in that it
"contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation. In
their purest form these two stories have no point in common." See Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics

of Prose, translated by Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), p. 44.

7. Howard Haycraft, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (New York,

1941), p. 9.

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. . Quite sane and straightforward-and quite understandable-in

an unpleasant way of course."8
Given the straightforwardness of her murders, why then are Agatha
Christie's whodunits so difficult to solve? The answer lies in the

reader's mistaken presumption that the mystery is complex and that

the texts are hermeneutically structured to enable a reader to imitate
the detective or alter-ego in sorting through clues to discover a pattern. Agatha Christie's hermeneutic, however, is a negating one, one
that takes a relatively simple murder and through the reading process
controverts the reader's reason. To quote again that source of wisdom,

Miss Marple, "The greatest thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind."9 What Dame Agatha consciously and insidiously
does is close the reader's mind. The clues themselves, then, become in-

significant, and the solution lies not in untangling their pattern, but
in discovering the mechanism by which the reader's mind is closed.
A riddle is enigmatic because there is an obstruction between the
image it presents and the referent the riddlee is supposed to guess. In
riddling scholarship this obstruction, following Petsch, is usually called
the block element.'0 Roger Abrahams has elaborated upon this concept
by delineating four different, though not always distinct, block elements (or riddling strategies): too little information, too much information,

contradiction, and false gestalt."1 A close examination of the construction

of Agatha Christie's whodunits shows that, at one time or another,

she makes use of each of these block elements to detour the reader from
the solution.

While most Agatha Christie mysteries utilize a multiplicity of riddling strategies, it is usually possible to single out one block element
as dominant. The 1939 Hercule Poirot novel, Sad Cypress, for instance,
is unsolvable because there is too little information.'2 In this story a
poisoning takes place in the presence of two women, one of whom,
8. Agatha Christie, The Moving Finger (New York, 1942). The quote is taken from the Dell

Paperback edition (1968), p. 180.

9. Ibid.

10. The term "block element" originates with Robert Petsch, Neue Beitrage zur Kenntnis des
Volkstratsels in Palaestra IV (Berlin, 1899). It has become common usage within folkloristics since

Robert A. Georges and Alan Dundes, "Toward a Structural Definition of the Riddle," Jour-

nal of American Folklore 76 (1963): 111-118

11. Roger Abrahams, "Introductory Remarks to A Rhetorical Theory of Folklore, " Journal of American Folklore 81 (1968): 143-158, and Roger Abrahams and Alan Dundes, "Riddles,"
in Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, ed. Richard Dorson (Chicago, 1972), pp. 129-144. I prefer

the term "contradiction" to Abrahams' "opposition."

12. Agatha Christie, Sad Cypress (New York, 1939).

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THE WHODUNIT AS RIDDLE 161

as the reader learns at the outset, is on trial for murder, and hence
may be presumed innocent (despite Witness for the Prosecution).'3 The
other woman, Nurse Hopkins, not only has the opportunity to com-

mit the murder, but having "misplaced" the precise poison used, has
the means as well. Moreover, she is seen urging the murdered girl to
make a will leaving everything (which turns out to be a considerable

legacy not a pittance) to her aunt in Australia. The block occurs

because Nurse Hopkins has no apparent motive. There is too little
information to connect Nurse Hopkins to the inheritance since the only
hint the reader receives is an aside that the unseen aunt is a nurse. The

crucial fact, that Nurse Hopkins and the Australian aunt are one and
the same, is revealed only in a Perry Mason style ending.

For a satisfying reading experience, as Van Dine insists, "The

reader must have an equal opportunity with the detective for solving
the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described."'4 And
since a reader cannot reason out a solution for which there is too little

information, but can only guess at it, this mystery riddling strategy

is the least fair. It is one, however, to which Christie rarely resorts,

and in Sad Cypress even the slightest hint would make it trivial to arrive at the solution. (For other writers, Conan Doyle, for instance, giving too little information is essential-Holmes is forever sending off

telegrams or utilizing arcane knowledge.)

A more reasonable block element is the opposite one, too much
information. There is a sense in which all "red herrings" are too much
information, extraneous facts that lead the reader astray. With writers

like Chandler and Hammett, as Jameson points out, entire subplots

filled with gangland murders are too much information, which is irrelevant to the enigma of the central murder.'5 Agatha Christie, too,
uses many "red herrings"'-the embezzling lawyer in Death on the Nile,
or the imposter archaelogist in Murder at the Vicarage are examplesbut they are usually introduced late in the text, and are easily identifiable by the attentive reader.'6 Sometimes, however, too much in-

formation becomes the dominant strategy for misleading the reader.

13. Agatha Christie, Witness for the Prosecution (New York, 1924). In this story the startling
revelation is that the defendant, cleared through dramatic last minute testimony, is, in fact, guilty.

14. S.S. Van Dine, "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories," in The Art of the Mystery
Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York, 1956), pp. 189-193. Originally published in American
Magazine, September, 1928.

15. F.R. Jameson, "On Raymond Chandler," Southern Review 6 (1970): 624-650.
16. Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile (New York, 1938); Murder at the Vicarage (New York,

1930).

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In Funerals Are Fatal, for example, Aunt Cora, who is known for her
tendency to state awkward and embarrassing truths, blurts out at her
brother's funeral, "But he was murdered wasn't he?'""17 When she in

turn is murdered, the police and reader alike assume that her death

is a result of knowledge about that of her brother. This awkward

"truth," however, turns out to be extraneous information; the
brother, in fact, had died an innocent death, and the murderer of Aunt

Cora is the only person it could be, her companion and legatee, Miss
Gilchrist, who had impersonated the victim in order to produce the
misdirecting clue.
An even more elaborate use of too much information is The A.B. C.
Murders. 18 In this novel there are three murders for which the only
apparent connection is that the victims' first and last initials coincide
with the first letter of the town where the murders take place in
alphabetical order. This coincidence, along with other clues such as
the presence of the British train time table known as the ABC, insists
that an alphabetical pattern be deciphered. The block element is that
there is no pattern, or, rather, that the pattern is the murderer's ar-

tifice. The real victim is the third one, Sir Carmichael Clarke of
Churston (the only wealthy victim), and the murderer is simply his

avaricious brother, Frank, who committed the other murders to

establish a false pattern to throw the police, and of course the reader,
off the scent. A similar block element is used in A Pocket Full of Rye in

which the elaborate pattern coinciding with the nursery rhyme is the

fabrication of the murderer, the black sheep son of the victim.'9

Perhaps even more basic to the whodunit than the "red herring"

is the block element contradiction. Locked rooms, iron clad alibis,

falsified times of death, letters from the already dead, and other contradictory clues of time, place, and manner usually must be explained
away before a murder can be deciphered. But such empirical contra-

dictions, favorites of writers as diverse as Poe, Conan Doyle, and

John Dickson Carr, should not bother the experienced reader, and are

usually only used by Christie as secondary devices. (One exception

is Murder in Mesopotamia where the principle block involves figuring out

how "Dr. Lerdner could murder his wife from the roof without leaving
17. Agatha Christie, Funerals are Fatal (New York, 1953). The quote is from the Pocket Book

edition (1975), p. 12.

18. Agatha Christie, The A.B.C. Murders (New York, 1936).
19. Agatha Christie, A Pocket Full of Rye (New York, 1953).

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THE WHODUNIT AS RIDDLE 163

it," a murder which is easily accomplished by the dropping of a heavy

quern attached to a rope.)20

More subtle are contradictions in character, murderous strategems
that seem implausible because they require more physical strength or
more intelligence than a given character would seem to possess. In The

Hollow, for instance, the philandering murdered husband's wife is

found standing over the body with a gun in her hand, but is easily
cleared since this gun turns out not to be the murder weapon.21 The
contradiction occurs because to throw initial suspicion on oneself in
order to be eliminated as a suspect is a stratagem that requires more
imagination and intelligence than the wife, "poor Gerda, " who is con-

sistently portrayed as a simpleton, would seem to possess. But she is

not so simple as all that, as the attentive reader should remember from
when early in the book she muses, "It was amusing to know more than

they thought you knew. To be able to do a thing, but not let anyone
know that you could do it.'"22

An even better illustration of contradiction occurs in one of

Christie's classics, And Then There Were None.23 In this book one fact

totally contradicts all others, rendering any solution impossible. All

of the suspects are dead, and the last to die could not have committed

suicide. The reader, of course, assumes that the dead must remain
dead, so when Justice Hargrave (the notorious "hanging judge" and
the only character not guilty of the death of an innocent, except
perhaps in his official capacity, and therefore the most obvious suspect

in these execution style killings) becomes the sixth victim, he is im-

mediately presumed innocent. But the reader learns of his death

through the statement of Dr. Armstrong, "He's been shot."" 24As
Agatha Christie insists time and again, information and interpretation provided by characters is often accidentally or deliberately false.
The reader, however, is usually too little wary of prevarication. One
can recognize that Dame Agatha in her last pronouncement is speak-

ing to the reader as well as to Hastings when Poirot says, "But

perhaps, after all, you have suspected the truth? Perhaps when you
read this, you already know. But somehow I do not think so . . . No,
20. Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia (New York, 1936).

21. Agatha Christie, The Hollow (New York, 1946).

22. Ibid. The quote is taken from the Dell paperback edition, retitled Murder After Hours (1976),

pp. 42-43.

23. Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None (New York, 1939).
24. Ibid. The quote is taken from the Washington Square paperback edition (1964), p. 136.

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you are too trusting ... You have too beautiful a nature.'"25 That
which is the product of a character's discourse is not necessarily true,
and so the once and future murdered Justice Hargrave may reasonably
rise from the dead to stalk his final victims.

Sklovskij, in an early Russian formalist study, has pointed to the

false gestalt as a general analogy for the whodunit. "These mysteries
at first present false solutions . . . ," he writes, as in the Russian folk

riddle, " 'It hangs dangling. Everybody grabs for it.' The solution:
'A towel.' "26 This analogy is, however, a little broad, and the notion
of false gestalt is better limited to those texts that allow not only for
alternative solutions, but for general misconceptions. (It should be
noted that, while for the riddle false gestalt involves instantaneous
recognition of a solution, usually an obscene one, which turns out to
be false, for the whodunit this block element is not distinct but is a
result of too much information or of a contradiction that leads the

reader into forming a false picture of the whole circumstances of the

murder, not just of its details.) One such false gestalt occurs in The
Body in the Library where the reader assumes that the body is who it is

supposed to be." This gestalt is reconstituted only when the witness

who identifies the body is shown to be an accomplice. Another false
gestalt that Christie induces is a misconception as to victim. In Peril
at End House the reader assumes that, unlike Hastings who tends to

jump to conclusions, Poirot is infallable, and therefore, he or she

follows the detective in believing that quiet Maggie Buckley has been
mistakenly done in instead of her lively cousin, Nick, whose potential assassination Poirot has cleverly deduced.28 In The Mirror Cracked,
when a harmless busybody, Mrs. Badcock, is killed by an overdose,
Dame Agatha hits the reader over the head with an epigraph from
Tennyson, "the mirror crack'd from side to side; 'The doom has come
upon me' cried the lady of Shallot, " repeated, in slightly altered form,
by a reliable witness to describe the actress Marina Gregg's reaction
upon learning that the busybody is the probable cause of her unhappy
infertility.29 Yet characters and readers alike are led astray because
the rest of the novel provokes the false gestalt that the murder is a
25. Agatha Christie, Curtain (New York, 1975). The quote is taken from the Dell Paperback

edition (1977), pp. 277-278.

26. Viktor Sklovskij, "The Mystery Novel: Dickens' Little Dorrit", in Readings in Russian
Poetics, eds. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 220-226.
27. Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library (New York, 1942).
28. Agatha Christie, Peril at End House (New York, 1931).
29. Agatha Christie, The Mirror Cracked (New York, 1963).

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THE WHODUNIT AS RIDDLE 165

mistake, that the intended victim is the jaded actress, herself, for whose

death there would be many possible suspects. In both cases the reader,

like Poirot, fails to consider "K," "a person who should have been
included in the original list, but who was overlooked."30 One need
only remember that corpses are usually not those of mistaken victims

to realize that it is the assumed targets, Nick Buckley and Marina

Gregg, who are actually the guilty parties. (The Caribbean Murders, in
which there really is a mistaken murder, albeit late in the book, is, I

believe, one of Christie's failures.)31

Most scholars accept any of these four block elements as legitimate
riddling devices appropriate to the "true riddle." Much less accepted
are those riddles that play with the riddle form itself, what are usually called, somewhat disdainfully, "riddle parodies." In riddle parodies
what prevents the riddlee from guessing the answer is certain assumptions about the nature of riddling. These may be termed generic blockers.

All genres set up certain norms and expectations-in riddling, that

the question is an enigmatic one, and that the information provided
is valid-which help inform the listener's or reader's interpretation.32
The generic norms and expectations for the riddle and the whodunit
are quite different, so while the four basic block elements for the riddle

are directly applicable to the whodunit, this is not the case for generic
blockers. One can certainly conceive of mysteries that use the riddle
parody device of having no enigma to confuse the reader, in which,
as in the riddle in the epigraph, misleading information is given not
by a character (in such cases the strategy is simply too much information or false gestalt) but by the author, or in which, as in many "neckriddles," the solution is wholly idiosyncratic (carrying "too little information" to the extreme).33 Such mysteries would, however, involve
radical transformations in form, changes in the generic dominant of
the sort I have elsewhere termed "breaking genre.""34 Certain post30. Christie, Peril at End House. The quote is taken from the Pocket Book Edition (1942),

p. 167.

31. Agatha Christie, A Caribbean Mystery (New York, 1964).

32. It is my view that the "parody riddle" shares the essential generic features, especially
social interactional ones, of the "true riddle" (with generic blockers simply being a different,
and probably historically newer, form of block element) and, therefore, it is better understood
as riddle than as joke.
33. The importance of the "neck-riddle" as a distinct riddle parody strategy was pointed out
to me by an anonymous reviewer of this essay. See John Dorst, "Neck-riddle as a Dialogue of
Genres: Applying Bakhtin's Genre Theory," Journal of Ameerican Folklore 96 (1983): 413-422.
34. On the concept of breaking genre, see Eliot A. Singer, "Breaking Genre: 'Big Fish, Little

Fish' as a Vaikuntha Play" (unpublished manuscript, 1983).

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modern novelists (e.g., Sorrentino, Berger, Feiffer, Brautigan), playing with the mystery form, have indeed broken genre, transforming
the dominant from "Who done it?" to more existential mysteries such
as "Who am I?" or "What is fiction?" But the whodunit as a more

complex form also has a multitude of less fundamental norms and expectations not present in the riddle, and these may be used to create
generic blockers without calling into question the very nature of the
form.

Various attempts have been made to codify the mystery. Van Dine's
famous set of twenty rules proclaims, among other things, "The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out

to be the culprit . . . there may be but one culprit . . . the culprit

must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story . . . [and] the method of the murder, and the
means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific."35 Members of
the British "Detective Club" must swear

That your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented
to them, using the wits it may please you to bestow upon them and not
placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of

God . . . To observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts, Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen,
Super-Criminals, and Lunatics, and utterly and for ever to foreswear

Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science.36

But such codifications invariably confuse expectations with norms. It

is absolutely essential to the whodunit that there be an apparent crime

(usually a murder), that someone seek to solve that crime, and that
the reader not learn of the solution until the final epiphany. All other
conventions, while presenting a certain aesthetic and insisting upon
fairness to the reader, are merely expectations.
Agatha Christie's genius lies most of all in her ability to prey upon
the reader's tendency to confuse expectations with norms to invent
generic blockers for her mysteries. For this skill, she was reviled by some

of her contemporaries: Van Dine dismissed one of her devices as "bald

trickery, on the par with offering some one a bright penny for a five35. Van Dine, pp. 190-191.
36. "The Detective Club Oath," in Haycraft, ed., The Art of the Mystery Story, pp. 197-199.

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THE WHODUNIT AS RIDDLE 167

dollar gold piece,""37 and Chandler said that another was "guaranteed
to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a half wit could guess it.38

But, as Dorothy Sayers argued, "I fancy . .. this opinion merely

represents a natural resentment at having been ingeniously bamboozled. All the necessary data are given. The reader ought to be able
to guess the criminal, if he is sharp enough, and nobody can ask for
more than this. It is, after all, the reader's job to keep his wits about
him, and, like the perfect detective, to suspect everybody.'"" Certainly
readers do not seem to feel cheated by Agatha Christie's whodunits
with generic blockers, which include some of her most famous and
best-selling works. While she could probably not get away with eschewing the interdiction against fantastic solutions (rationality is too
central to the whodunit) or with overuse of the same generic blocker
(after a while the reader's expectations would change), she has clearly
shown that highly satisfying mysteries can be constructed by testing
the limits of generic expectations.
As Revzin has pointed out, the solutions to whodunits involve the
equation of other dramatis personae with the murderer, but what he
fails to note is that certain dramatis personae, the conventional roles
of Holmes, Watson, and Lestrade, are expected to be immune from
this equation.40 Christie has systematically broken this expectation.4
Her most famous case is, of course, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.42 Here

the murderer, again the most obvious, is Dr. Sheppard, who, unfortunately for the reader, is also the narrator. Christie is eminently fair,
here, in that she makes it clear that the role of narrator is of Dr. Shep-

pard's own choosing, that he is not a particular friend of Hercule

Poirot. But the generic block is so powerful that this mystery is almost
impossible for any reader to solve. In A Holiday for Murder, it is the in-

vestigating policeman, Superintendent Sugden, who commits the

37. Van Dine, p. 189.
38. Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder," in Haycraft, ed., The Art of the Mystery

Story, p. 230. The essay originally was published in The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1944.
39. Dorothy Sayers, "The Omnibus of Crime," in Haycraft, ed., The Art of the Mystery Story,
p. 98, originally published as her introduction to Omnibus of Crime (New York, 1929).
40. I.I. Revzin, "Notes on the Semiotic Analysis of Detective Novels: With Examples from
the Novels of Agatha Christie," New Literary History 9 (1978): 385-388.
41. Christie is certainly not the only mystery writer, nor necessarily the first, to make generically proscribed characters the murderer. Among others, Israel Zangwell, in The Big Bow Mystery

(London, 1892) makes his detective the murderer, Nicholas Blake (C. Day Lewis) effectively
has "Watson" do it in The Beast Must Die (London, 1938), and Raymond Chandler, in The Lady
in the Lake (New York, 1946), uses a hard-boiled cop.
42. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (New York, 1926).

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murder.43 Again the narrative discourse provides ample clues-Sugden is introduced before the murder takes place, coincidentally arrives
on the scene as the body is being discovered, and is around altogether

too much for someone in the Lestrade role-but the generic block
prevents him from being suspected. In Curtain even Poirot becomes
a murderer." As he insists in a letter to Hastings, the solution should
be obvious, given the execution style of the killing ("the mark of Cain"
made by a bullet in the center of the the forehead), the presence of
lesser details such as that only Poirot was shorter than the victim, and
especially the fact that Poirot had already demonstrated that the victim was an unconvictable murderer. And Curtain is, after all, a posthumous book. But who could be more above suspicion than the hero
of most of Dame Agatha's greatest works.
Christie also systematically breaks other generic expectations. In
several books she uses Van Dine's only one culprit rule as a generic
blocker. In Death on the Nile, for instance, three murders are committed,

and everyone has an inviolate alibi for at least one of them.45 The solu-

tion would be obvious in real life: the primary victim's husband,

Simon Doyle, and his apparently estranged lover, Jacqueline de
Bellefort, are conspirators attempting to inherit a rich wife's wealth.

But whodunit conventions so frown upon accomplices that Christie's

use of them is surprising and effective. Murder on the Calais Coach (better

known as Murder on the Orient Express) takes this generic blocker even

further.46 The wounds on the body seem to have been made by a

dozen different people, and all of the passengers on the train have
fabricated their identities to cover up connections to the victim. As in

so many whodunits, everyone looks guilty. What makes this novel so

original and unsolvable is that everyone is guilty.
Another generic blocker is the expectation that characters who are
suspected by the police are automatically innocent. In Christie's first
novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the victim's husband Alfred Ingle-

thorp is under the heavy suspicion of the police until Poirot, with great
show and effort, uncovers an alibi, which because of its scandalous

nature, the suspect is apparently unwilling to use.47 Since, conventionally, the detective and not the police must be correct, the reader
43. Agatha Christie, Murder For Christmas (New York, 1938).
44. Christie, Curtain.
45. Christie, Death on the Nile.
46. Agatha Christie, Murder on the Calais Coach (New York, 1934).
47. Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styes (New York, 1920).

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THE WHODUNIT AS RIDDLE 169

is induced to check the husband off the list of real suspects. But by us-

ing a readily discoverable alibi to clear the husband earlier rather than
later in the text, Poirot is then free to demonstrate an alternative solu-

tion with Inglethorp as the murderer. In the more mature Murder at

the Vicarage, Lawrence Redding, the victim's wife's lover, actually is

arrested." He is, however, quickly cleared on evidence supplied by

none other than Miss Marple. But since his innocence is established
early in the book, it then becomes possible for Christie to re-establish
him as the murderer at the end.

Probably the most basic whodunit expectation is that the murder must
be committed by the murderer. But in Curtain, as is appropriate for Christie's

terminal Poirot mystery, even this expectation is broken.4" Stephen

Norton does not murder anyone; yet as a catalyst he is the murderer.

Dame Agatha gives the reader no less a clue than Othello, but the
whodunit genre is not Shakespearean drama, so recognition of this
Iago's culpability is firmly blocked.
Most texts withhold key bits of information necessary to their interpretation. In TomJones, for instance, the revelation of the crucial
identity of Tom's mother is saved for the end (and there are similar
lesser revelations throughout.) Finnegan 's Wake is so hermetic that the
words themselves must be deciphered. But it is in the whodunit that
what Barthes calls the "hermeneutic code" becomes dominant; the

pleasure of the text lies principally in its enigma, and in "the expectation and desire for its solution." 50

Nevertheless, while all whodunits may be dominated by the hermen-

eutic code, not all entail the same hermeneutic process. "Classic detective stories rely on a simple pattern of interpretation, treating sensory
data (clues) as signs for hidden facts about events in the past and hid-

den truths about characters' personalities.'"51 Holmes' "method," for

instance, "is a practical semiotics: his goal is to consider data of all
kinds of potential signifiers and to link them, however disparate and
incoherent they seem, to a coherent set of signifieds, that is to turn
them into signs of a hidden order behind the manifest confusion, of the
solution to the mystery, of the truth."'52 The conventional wisdom is that

the whodunit reader, like the detective, starts with a blank slate, and
48. Christie, Murder at the Vicarage.

49. Christie, Curtain.

50. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, translated by Richard Miller (New York, 1974), p. 75.

51. Stowe, p. 366.

52. Ibid., pp. 367-368.

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then receives a series of clues, each of which must be deciphered and

properly arranged on the slate until a complete pattern can be formed.
The process of pattern formation is gradual, and the reading, like the

playing of the board game Clue, is progressive; presumably, the further along the narrative and the more clues available, the more complete the pattern.
Such a progressive hermeneutic structure most resembles a puzzle,
and the author an encoding cryptographer. But, as Symons argues,

"The deception in . . . Christie stories is much more like the conjurer's sleight of hand. She shows us the ace of spades face up. Then
she turns it over, but we still know where it is, so how has it been
transformed into the five of diamonds?"53 Or more accurately, we
assume that the card will no longer be the ace of spades, and yet it is.

Following a progressive series of Agatha Christie's clues only leads to

total confusion: the significance of each is very obscure, and it is impossible to decide which signifiers may, in fact, have empty signifieds.
The reader is no nearer the solution and indeed is often further from

it, just before the epiphany than at the beginning of the book; the only

characters who have really been eliminated as suspects are the dead,

and even these not absolutely. (My own experience has been that I
have been most successful in guessing the murderer before the first
murder occurs, or by choosing from a list of the "cast of characters"
before even starting to read.) When it comes, the revelation is sudden and surprising. And it is not built up to by a series of clues; it is
systematically obstructed.

When most critics use the terms "puzzle" and "riddle" interchangeably as synonyms for the whodunit, they are missing a crucial
structural difference. Puzzles are really solved through the accumula-

tion of clues. Riddles can almost never be solved deductively; the key
to their hermeneutic structure is the block element. It is the block ele-

ment that Agatha Christie has elevated to the prominent hermenuetic

device for the whodunit. While she is not the only mystery writer who
structures her plots around the block element (nor is it invariably pres-

ent in her books), she certainly has made the most systematic and best

use of it. One text or another of hers has incorporated all of the
available kinds of blockers, and even when she has repeated herself,
53. Julian Symons, Mortal Consequences: A History fom the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (New

York, 1972), p. 130.

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THE WHODUNIT AS RIDDLE 171

as is inevitable given the paucity of riddling strategies and her prolific output, there is a sufficient freshness to minimize the sense of
dejd-vu. And by fooling the reader into overlooking the most obvious
suspects, rather than by selecting some clues and ignoring others in
choosing an arbitrary murderer, Agatha Christie, almost uniquely,
has consistently been able to produce whodunits whose final solutions
are the most reasonable and, therefore, the most satisfying.

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