For today’s episode, Fable and the Verbivore continue exploring the topic of mystery novels by digging into Agatha Christie’s Crooked House. Mystery author George Dyer said that “Writing a mystery story is like playing a game of chess with a thousand unknown opponents”, and Christie was one of the experts.

Spoiler alert for this episode as we dissect some of the plot twists and the end of this book.

Throughout this episode, we discuss how the author uses her knowledge of the psychology of her characters to weave a complicated web of possible suspects who could have committed the murder of the larger than life family patriarch Aristide Leonides by slowly revealing their layers, unique relationships, and circumstances over time. We also dive into how, in this story about a house filled with ruthless family members - all of who have secrets to keep, the author uses many tricks of misdirection in the placing of her clues as well as timely reveals and reversals to keep the story spinning into new directions and the reader guessing.

We also unpack how she creates a fair game with a puzzle that could be solved, but she uses writing techniques to mask or give more than one interpretation to the information presented. Like the character Watson in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, the amateur sleuth Charles is both a biased observer and often comes to the wrong conclusion. She also uses the prejudices and bias of her society to cast suspicion on some characters and remove it from others.

Agatha Christie (lived 1890 to 1976) is known as one of the most prolific writers in the Mystery and Thriller genre, having published sixty-six detective novels and fourteen short story collections between. She is considered to be one of the early trailblazers in the Mystery genre and many authors use the ideas, devices, and tropes found in her work in their modern mysteries. Many of her novels include one of her two famous sleuths Poirot and Miss Marple. Crooked House is a standalone book within an amateur sleuth. It was one of her later written works and a personal favorite.

We hope you enjoy listening to this episode! Keep reading, and writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

The Verbivore referenced a quote from an article on mystery that says that “Writing a mystery story is like playing a game of chess with a thousand unknown opponents”. The author was George Dyer and here are the links to these articles:

• Vintage WD: Murder for Profit, Mystery Story Techniques Part 1 - https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/vintage-wd-murder-for-profit-mystery-story-techniques-part-1

• Vintage WD: Murder for Profit, Mystery Story Techniques Part 2 - https://www.writersdigest.com/be-inspired/vintage-wd-murder-for-profit-mystery-story-techniques-part-2

The Verbivore mentions a trick to have two outlines to manage your mystery and another to manage all of the clues (real clues, false clues, pivotal clues) and what your suspects are up to at any given point in the novel. There are several resources that mentioned this practice, but the YouTube video “NANOWRIMO / How to Write a Murder Mystery” by Rae Sterling was the most helpful and concise.

The Verbivore talks about a quote from Crooked House that describes each family member as having different kinds of ruthlessness. Here is that full quote:

• There's a lot of ruthlessness in us - and - different kinds of ruthlessness. That's what's so disturbing. The different kinds

The Verbivore references Sherlock’s quote about it being lucky that he did not have criminal tendencies. That quote is here:

• “It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal” - The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans

The Verbivore references Rian Johnson’s subversion of the mystery genre in his movie Knives Out by purposefully adding in thriller elements and beats into his story. She doesn’t reference details to keep from spoiling the movie, but there are several great YouTube videos that explore this melding of these story elements. Here are the links [Spoiler Alert]:

• Behind the Curtain’s “How I Wrote Knives Out — Writing Advice from Rian Johnson” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd4XUCIqoFU

• Just Write’s “How Knives Out Switches Genres (Twice)” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfF7-vJJBNY

Books Mentioned:

• Crooked House by Agatha Christie

• The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie

• The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Movies Mentioned:

• Crooked House - Directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, Screenplay by Julian Fellowes

• Knives Out - Written and Directed by Rian Johnson

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
’Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)