Miss Agatha Christie has just written, without apology, her fiftieth
thriller,t and one feels that she has enjoyed .the writing of them as greatly as others have enjoyed the reading of them. On looking through the list I find that I have read no more than thirty- five, which is fifteen times as surprising to me as would be the discovery that there was a play of Shakespeare's of which 1 had never heard. For I began with the first one, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, thirty years ago, and thought it then, and still think it, the model detective story. When Orlando says to Adam, " As I remember, Adam, it was on this faihion," it is not Orlando telling Adam, who knew all about it, but Shakespeare telling the audience, who knew nothing. In the same way the detective-story writer has to keep in mind, not only the development of his story, but the proper mystification of the reader. It is the triumph of crafts- manship to make the one end serve the other ; to make, as it were, Orlando's speech as necessary to the plot as it is to the understanding of the plot. In her first book Miss Agatha Christie did this brilliantly, her deception of the reader being implicit in the conduct of the murderer. This is not the case in the book more generally, con- sidered her masterpiece, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, where the surprise is artificially brought about by making the murderer the narrator.
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