I recently read Agatha Christie’s novel Appointment With Death. Published in 1938, it was the sixteenth novel featuring Hercule Poirot. Despite it being very well done, I find it a strangely unsatisfying book. Curiously, I’m inclined to say that I find it unsatisfying because it does such an excellent job of following play fair rules, and even of following G.K. Chesterton’s (good) advice on writing mysteries. That is, I think it does such a good job as a puzzle that it suffers as a novel. (note: spoilers follow.)

There is the issue that the subject is somewhat intrinsically a downer. A family is tormented by their cruel mother who holds the purse strings and was so heavily manipulated that none of them decided that there are more important things than money and struck off on their own. (To be fair, as one of the characters pointed out, they had no skills and it was during the Great Depression, which was a particularly difficult time to find employment as an unskilled laborer.)

I think that the thing which really made the solution unsatisfying was that it was—basically—unrelated to the main plot. Most of the book was taken up with Sarah King and the Boyntons and their obsession with getting free of Mrs. Boynton. Now, to be fair, this is practically the ideal when it comes to detective-novel-as-puzzle stories. That it turns out that the murder was really about something that was in front of our face but we didn’t notice would be how many people would describe the goal of a detective story, or at least a classic, golden-age detective story. The problem comes down to an unwritten rule of this type of detective story: if a red herring is completely unrelated to the solution, it must be a minor part of the story.

The connection between the red herring and the solution does not need to very strong. It suffices, for example, that the red herring helped to give the murderer opportunity. Another possible connection is that the murderer used the red herring as cover. In extremis, the murderer can even use the red herring as a red herring (the original red herrings were smoked fish dragged across a scent trail to try to fool hounds). This would consist of bringing the red herring to the attention of the detective when he should know that it isn’t related, which would then be evidence that he has some motive, leading the detective to him.

What I find disappointing about Appointment With Death is that most of the book is an unrelated red herring. Nothing that any of the suspects did was in any way related to the murder, which had taken place before all of their actions anyway. Indeed, the victim had specifically gotten them out of the way.

Now, there was a great deal of interesting detection in getting all of the Boynton family out of the way; I very much enjoyed how this culminated in Poirot pointing out how strange it was that a servant went to fetch Mrs. Boynton because none of her family did, suggesting that they all knew that she was already dead and didn’t want to be the one to have to officially find out. It was also a well-crafted inter-relationship of everyone suspecting each other, motivating these actions. This part was all great, but it was really a different book from figuring out who killed Mrs. Boynton. Once it was all cleared away, Poirot them brings out the evidence of who killed her. This, I think, is really my objection. There was no need, story wise, to clear everything else up before bringing out this evidence. So much so, the revelation of all of the evidence related to the killing of Mrs. Boynton was in its own chapter.

This evidence that Lady Westholme was the murderer stood on its own and didn’t need any of the family’s muddling to be cleared away first. It would have worked equally well to have shown the evidence that it was Lady Westholme who killed Mrs. Boynton, then afterwards to explain why everyone lied in giving the wrong time of death. It would have been far more satisfying, I think, if it would not have worked equally well in that order.

In a sense, this gets at the same problem as I discussed in my post about a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine scene. In the scene, one character asks another about what was true in all the things he said. The other replies that it was all true. “Even the lies?”

“Especially the lies.”

Now, Deep Space Nine never paid that line off, but this is a decent way of describing the ideal in a mystery. The evidence should be available and everyone but the brilliant detective should misunderstand it. But they should not completely misunderstand it. The pinnacle of achievement in a mystery story is for the author to come up with a way in which even the lies are true. That, I think, is what makes it a truly human drama and not merely a puzzle.

The way that Appointment With Death was written, it was really two stories that interleaved with each other but did not relate to each other. One is a novel about an unhappy family, the other is a short story about the correct interpretation of an ambiguous statement.

There’s also a curious aspect to reading this story now, in the year of our Lord 2023, with it having been published in 1938. Agatha Christie couldn’t have known this but the book was published very shortly before World War 2. It contains an epilogue set five years later, which would place it in the heart of the war. Yet in the epilogue everyone is happy. This could work if the main story was set several years before, say, in 1934. With the Boyntons being Americans, the care-free atmosphere could make sense in 1939 since America was not to (officially) join the war until December of 1941. This would not be unreasonable. And there is precedent for the books being set out of their publication order. In an afterword in Murder in Mesopotamia, published in 1936, which explicitly sets it right before Murder on the Orient Express, which was published in 1934.

Anyway, This is no fault of the construction of the book, of course, but it still makes it a little bit of a weird experience to read it.