Exploring Agatha Christie's Art of Deception and Digression - Page 3
© Pamela St. Clair
Section four amasses all of the clues and arguments Bayard has neatly presented thus far. And, like the Christie novel, Bayard’s alternate solution to the mystery is a complete surprise. The subtitle The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery now makes perfect sense, for Bayard has approached his analysis like the very mystery he’s dismembering. In full view of the reader, as Van Dine advocates, Bayard drops clues, hints, and half truths and then offers up a murderer that, if you’re like me, will come as a complete surprise. At first you feel duped, not because his solution isn’t plausible, for it makes complete sense, but because you have been gullible. Bayard has been instructing you not to do what you’ve been doing all along, trusting the half-truths and disregarding gaps in the text. Then, you feel duped by Christie because Bayard convinces you that his solution is the solution Christie intends, even though she has Poirot advance a different theory. Lastly, you marvel at the prospect that if Bayard’s assertions have merit, then possibly other Christie novels deserve rereading too; perhaps the real killers have escaped the reader. You will start to dig out those dog eared worn paperback mysteries—ah, but like scattered bread crumbs leading down a tangential path, I digress.
Who does Bayard single out? That’s a mystery you will have to solve for yourself...
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