Have you ever correctly guessed the murderer or the culprit in any of the Agatha Christie books and short stories (or in the show)?
Only once, I guess. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (book). There are some very obvious hints to the murderer.
Jessica Rabbit
"I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way."
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Only once, in a novel which original title I forget (something about 'elephants'?. Quite early in there was a line about the victim having had a twin sister who 'looked very much like her' and I was able to deduce just about everything else right there and then. I couldn't believe it'd really be this simple, so I skipped to the end and sure enough, I was spot on.
I was so _disappointed_ I actually stopped reading and never picked it up since! :/
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"Never finish what you can't start!" ;)
^ Ah yes, that'd be Elephants Can Remember, one of Christie's last novels with a solution so unsurprising it should've been a short story at best. Hopefully the new adaptation keeps it from being a dead giveaway.
shareI guessed correctly once (if you include the whole scenario of how the murder came about and not merely the "I feel this guy might have done it because he's fishy" sort of thing). It was "The Third Girl". I actually made myself write it down to make sure, once I reached the end, that it wasn't a figment of my imagination that I'd guessed it beforehand.
I also guessed "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd", but that was solely due to the fact that I'd read "Endless Night" years before, so I was already aware that Dame Agatha was not unfamiliar or unwilling to go down the sinister narrator / sinister lead route. I'd also read blurbs from the cover of the book, which I normally refrain from doing, and as most have characterized the conclusion as "the most shocking one yet" and as "Agatha Christie rewriting the rules of detective fiction", it hinted strongly at the conclusion that in the end proved accurate. So I don't really take credit for that one. Had I been reading Christie in chronological order and refrained from the blurbs, I'd have been just as shocked as people were at the time it came out.
You who got "Ackroyd", I salute you. When I read it, I was lucky enough to have heard nothing about it, or the controversy; it was just 'oh, an old book, let's dip into it'. At the end I thought ' ..hey, hey! You can't *do* that!' Later I found it had got just the same response in the 1920's, with critics crying 'foul'! Except Dorothy Sayers, who cried 'Fair! And fooled you!'.
"I did what little had to be done". Urk. I think it was this story that lead Father Knox to write Rule One of his famous (somewhat joking) Ten Rules of Detective Fiction.
Murder in Mesopotamia.
My general rule when read/watching murder mysteries is "who is the least likely culprit and why?" and Murder in Mesopotamia fitted quite nicely into that theory.
But, statistically, considering the volume of work you're bound to guess at least one.
”Do the stars gaze back?" Now *that's* a question.
Just watched it and I don't know if I'd say I guessed it, he was my chief suspect.
The story, as a whole there, is completely ridiculous.
On what planet can a woman marry the same man twice without noticing that it's the same man?
My biggest success was After the Funeral, guessed the murderer and pretty much worked out the motive as well :)
The more you read/ watch of Christie, the better you get at working out the killer. For me, the more impressive challenge is working out motives and how it was done. I think I also correctly guessed The Clocks and Peril at End House. Have been totally clueless for many - Appointment with Death and Halloween Party left me particularly brain dead, had no idea who the killer was.
A small handful of times. One of the fun little traditions with my family was to pause the show just before the denouement and give our predictions. Some of the short stories were a little obvious, and Death in the Clouds was one of my proudest deductions.
We're police officers! We're not trained to handle this kind of violence!
Maybe not the most time but almost half of them, the last one was the Mousetrap play in London.
i correctly guessed the murderer in "They came to Baghdad" (my favourite of all Agatha Chrisites books). "Death comes as the end" well not many people were left at the end anymore so that was rather easy to guess also i think. Although i have read "The Big Four" two times i still do not understand who is the murderer - hopefully this will become clear to me when the poirot episode is made. Also "Postern of Fate" i know who was the murderer of the later crime, but who was the murderer of the original crime that Tuppence discovered the letter of in the book?
sharemiss mullins (posed as a gardener) who was the great niece of the granddaughter of the original doctor who killed mary jordan
I think The Mousetrap is where the old saw the butler did it originally came from.
share