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STYLES_OF_CARDBOARD

                                                    April 20, 2006
                                                    May   21, 2013

Agatha Christie's
"The Mysterious Affair at Styles" (1920)
                                         SPOILERS
And the mystery of creation of character.

Christie's Styles is more or less readable,
but only just. The setup for the mystery
involves multiple people with potential
marital scandals, all coming to head at the
same time.  The resolution has different            John Dickson Carr's
people skulking around acting independantly at      "The Four False Weapons"
cross-purposes, all on the same night, with no      has similar problems.
reason given for the coincidence.

    It's also perhaps a disappointment
    that the guilty party is a conspiracy:   It's a problem with the mystery
    two characters acting in concert,        genre: conspiracies have
    concealing their alliance.               certainly been known to happen,
                                             but as a solution to a murder
                                             mystery, they seem inelegant,
                                             on the verge of cheating.

Probably the most interesting                              Just as it would be
thing is Poriot and his absence     But I find             cheating if the
of character.  He's a collection    Poriot works           murderer were some
of funny ticks: a dandy who         better in              stranger you'd never
straightens vases compulsively,     OTR (and               seen on stage.
and emits frenchisms (he's          perhaps
Belgian) every other sentence.      PBS): An                    It's hard to
                                    actor can                   rule out a
But compare this to John            flesh him out.              murder's
Dickson Carr's "Gideon Fell" or                                 confederate
"Sir H.M. Merrivale", who are                                   as a logical
similar collections of funny                                    possibility,
ticks, and yet they add up to                                   but there's
something that registers a                                      an implicit
little more like character.                                     rule against
                                                                it on this
And still further along that                                    esthetic ground.
axis, consider Nero Wolfe:
formulaic quirk-upon-quirk, and                        But Carr whined about
yet that cantankerous bellowing,                       the restriction; And
that streak of infantile                               Agatha Christie,
laziness, it all adds up to a                          needless to say, has
remarkably believeable portrait.                       been very popular with
                                                       people who aren't me.

                                              It might be interesting to
                                              compare how people react to
                                              fictional conspiracy and how
                                              they react to speculations
                                              about actual ones: some are
                                              fascinated, others repelled.

                                              THE_THEORY_OF_CONSPIRACY



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