Ariadne Oliver never actually gets to be the detective. She's the sidekick, the foil, the mouthpiece for Agatha Christie's own mistakes and second thoughts. She may have intuitions and they may be correct, but she's never the hero, the real detective.
If you are avoiding spoilers for a 1939 novel, do not read this. I am using the new BBC adaptation as our jumping-off point, but there are no major differences in plot (only in sexiness and cocaine usage.)
I am a person who, like Hercule Poirot, prefers comfort and regular meals to menacing ex-girlfriends and sinister train conductors. It is my belief that Agatha Christie's beloved detective series, while excellent, would have been vastly improved had the bit with the murders been edited out and readers been left with 200 pages of Poirot sitting down to elegant, well-arranged little meals with tidy cutlery arrangements and delightful little dessert carts Presented without further comment:…
Beulah Maud Devaney's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
In your previous life you were a medical practitioner and accidentally killed a patient while drunk. Since then you have stopped drinking, changed your name to something with the same initials as your previous name, and moved within 5 miles of the original murder. You have also married the dead patient's spouse.
In his 1950 essay, "The Simple Art of Murder," Raymond Chandler gripes: "[t]he average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average--or only slightly above average--detective story does." Among the "average" detective writers he calls out is Agatha Christie. He's partly right--her murders are often unrealistic (Really? They were all the killer?) and she shamelessly recycles story elements. But…
