Читать книгу Agatha Christie’s Complete Secret Notebooks - Агата Кристи, Agatha Christie, Detection Club The - Страница 62

Christie never resorted to elaborate mechanical or scientific means to explain her ingenuity, and much of her popularity and accessibility lies in her adherence to this simplicity. Many of her last-chapter surprises can be explained in a few sentences. Once you have grasped the essential fact that the corpse identified as A is, in fact, Corpse B and vice versa everything else falls into place; when you realise that all twelve suspects conspired to murder one victim all confusion disappears; when it dawns that the name Evelyn can mean a male or a female little further explanation is necessary.

Van Dine 14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific.

Knox 4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need long scientific explanation at the end.

While Christie uses poisons as a means of killing characters more than most of her contemporaries, she uses only those that are scientifically known. But, that said, thanks to her training as a dispenser, she had more knowledge of the subject than many of her fellow writers and was familiar with unusual poisons and the more unusual properties of the common ones. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, depends for its surprise solution on knowledge of the properties of strychnine, but this is not unreasonable as the reader is fully aware of the poison used. In fact, there is a graphic description of the death of Mrs Inglethorpe and a discussion of the effects of, and the chemical formula for, strychnine. Taxine in A Pocket Full of Rye, ricin in ‘The House of Lurking Death’ from Partners in Crime, thallium in The Pale Horse and physostigmine in Crooked House are just some of the unusual poisons featuring in Christie. Fictitious drugs such as Serenite in A Caribbean Mystery, Calmo in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side and Benvo in Passenger to Frankfurt also feature, but as the plot does not turn on their usage, they merely bend, rather than break, Knox’s Rule.