I recently revisited Agatha Christie, rereading A Murder is Announced and reading, for the first time, Death on the Nile and Five Little Pigs. Coming back to Christie made me think about the particular pleasure of her novels (and probably other whodunnits).
One quality that bubbled up was how the "forward" plots in the novels modify what we have just experienced. New information forces us to go backwards and layer that knowledge on what we've already read. The experience of the story, therefore, goes in multiple directions: forward, as we turn the pages; but also backwards, to modify what we know to have happened; and even upwards or downwards, as the import makes me completely change the framing of the story. Is this ultimately a story about - greed? About love?
Death on the Nile and Five Little Pigs struck me as distillations of this form - as Poirot accrues information and airs hypotheses, we continually modify our answer to the question of "what is this story about:" an amoral greed that leads to murder, reckless youth, or - love? (Without too much spoilers, it turns out that both of those two novels were ultimately about "love;" Christie was something of a sop, it seems.)
One quality that bubbled up was how the "forward" plots in the novels modify what we have just experienced. New information forces us to go backwards and layer that knowledge on what we've already read. The experience of the story, therefore, goes in multiple directions: forward, as we turn the pages; but also backwards, to modify what we know to have happened; and even upwards or downwards, as the import makes me completely change the framing of the story. Is this ultimately a story about - greed? About love?
Death on the Nile and Five Little Pigs struck me as distillations of this form - as Poirot accrues information and airs hypotheses, we continually modify our answer to the question of "what is this story about:" an amoral greed that leads to murder, reckless youth, or - love? (Without too much spoilers, it turns out that both of those two novels were ultimately about "love;" Christie was something of a sop, it seems.)
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