by William Friend
When I was a kid, I went through a distinct phase of being obsessed with murder mysteries. Between the ages of eleven and fourteen, I’d regularly shake down the shelves of the school library for every Christie novel I could find. I marvelled at them, and could never guess the ending—though in hindsight, I wonder if that was because I never really tried.
The Christopher Nolan film The Prestige contains a line about how your average punter responds to a magic trick: “Now you’re looking for the secret…but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking… You want to be fooled.” I think that was true of 11-year-old me. I adored the spine-tingling moment when Jane or Hercule revealed the solution. I had no desire to unpick Christie’s methods, and work out how she always managed to deliver the goods.
If you don’t want to know either, stop reading now…
Like a lot of people, I drifted away from Christie as I got older, eschewing her work for more psychological, more emotional fiction. But that changed a few years ago, around the time my first novel was published, and its unusual blend of horror, character study, literariness, and good old-fashioned suspense threw me headlong into a debate with my publishers about genre that I’d, naively, never previously given much thought to.
So, keen to better understand the architecture of a genre which I found myself, if not in, then certainly adjacent to, I began rereading Christie, with different eyes. This time around, I wanted to learn how the trick was done.
In the famous speech from The Prestige that I partially quoted above, Michael Caine’s character breaks down stage magic like this: “Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called the Pledge. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man… The second act is called the Turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary…but you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call the Prestige.”
Christie’s brilliance is widely appreciated, but—I would argue—much less widely understood, even though it’s simple at root. Her plots almost always unfold like this: a person stands to gain something significant by committing a crime—an enormous inheritance, usually, though occasionally some other advantage. This is the Pledge: a killer with a motive so obvious and so understandable, it almost feels banal.
But then comes the Turn. The crime takes place and, seemingly, there’s no possible way for the character with the strongest motive to have committed it. So we, the reader, work our way through the broader cast, sifting for clues. But these clues are all red herrings, for at the heart of the Turn lay a trick, usually to do with identity. Perhaps the killer isn’t who they’re purporting to be. Perhaps the corpse was misidentified. Perhaps a crucial alibi rests upon the donning of a disguise.
In today’s world, a world of AI and deepfakes, DNA and biometrics—a world where deception is both easier than ever to commit yet harder than ever to sustain—even an author as gifted as Christie might have struggled to pull off these identity deceits. Perhaps that’s why, although her tales have been adapted extensively, no major adaptation has brought them into the present day; their Turns are almost always born out of, and would only be effective in, the analogue era.
After the Turn, Christie performs her Prestige. The elaborate deception that threw us off course is unravelled by the novel’s detective, miraculously bringing back the “ordinary object”—the killer with a clear and conspicuous motive—that Christie had previously made “disappear”.
This, I think, is what makes Christie’s stories so consistently satisfying: the solution feels both surprising and obvious at the same time, which tickles your brain. That sounds simple, but it’s a dimension to her genius that is often missed. For the proof of that, just watch any of the myriad adaptions of Christie on the small or silver screen that miss the mark. When an adaptation fails, it’s almost always because the screenwriter failed to grasp one thing: that the killer should have a simple, powerful motive, from which we are then misdirected.
Why is that aspect of Christie’s work so often overlooked? I’d say it’s because her novels are generally celebrated precisely for the intricacy of their plots—the misdirection—and not their characterisation: the thing we’re misdirected from.
That’s partly fair. In real life, no matter how strong the incentive, murder is rare in the absence of other psychological factors that are heavily predictive of violence—mental illness, childhood trauma, and so on. Christie’s killers almost never have that kind of rich, psychological hinterland—or if they do, the need to keep the reader guessing till the very end means that it’s only ever lightly explored. Her characterisation, in short, is bang on the money, but tells just a fraction of the story.
Perhaps this is why I’ve yet to write a whodunnit, and why I drifted away from Christie in the first place. How do you set about doing the kind of intimate character work that, as a writer, most interests me, whilst keeping within the constraints of the mystery genre?
When I came to write my latest novel, And the Sea Gave Up the Dead, I found myself mulling over precisely that question. Although itisn’t a traditional murder mystery—like my debut, it’s too off-beat, too character-focused, and far too spooky for that—it’s maybe the closest I’ll come to writing one, at least in its premise.
At the heart of the novel is Morwenna: an Englishwoman who takes her children on holiday to the south of France to visit her aging Aunt Bethan, whose husband mysteriously went missing at sea several years ago. Like Constance Blackwood in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Aunt Bethan lives under a shadow of suspicion—isolated by the locals, holed up in a crumbling château. The château, however, has more in common with Hill House than the Blackwood estate. Violence took place there centuries ago, seeping into its boards and bones.
Disturbed by the house, and the chilling effect it has on her children, Morwenna seeks the advice of a spiritualist, and receives an unsettling direction: “You must solve the riddle of the drowned man, and unmask his killer.” And yet, as I said, this novel is no whodunnit. How can Morwenna solve the riddle of her uncle’s disappearance with no obvious clues and no suspects?
I shan’t answer that here, of course. Suffice it to say, there’s a piece of misdirection at the heart of the novel—a Christie-inspired sleight of hand—that I hope will be enough to pull the wool over my readers’ eyes. If it isn’t, then to paraphrase The Prestige one last time, I’ll just have to hope that they find the world of the novel magical enough that they won’t look too hard, and will want to be fooled.
William Friend is the author of Let Him In and the forthcoming And the Sea Gave Up the Dead, out in August 2026. He writes literary horror and suspense. Find out more at williamfriend.com.
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