thesis on agatha christie

A once-lost Agatha Christie murder mystery makes its Texas debut in Denton

For 74 years, Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero original play, which was adapted from her 1944 book of the same title, was lost.

This is, until it was discovered in 2015. The original script made its European debut in 2019 and became available for performance in theaters.

Co-directors Vanessa Welch and Ash Robbins say this past weekend was the first time a production based on Christie’s original script made its Texas debut at the Theatre Denton Annex in the Golden Triangle Mall.

The murder mystery thriller probes the psychology of jealousy that leads to an investigation of a brutal murder, making the audience guess who the murderer might be.

“It feels like we’re just part of history, and for people, especially like Vanessa [Welch] or other people that just love Agatha Christie, they really are getting to see something that was not edited by anyone else,” Robbins said. “This is truly what she envisioned from her book.”

Those familiar with Christie’s work know that Gerald Verner’s Towards Zero play adaptation is the most notable stage version.

The original script was written by Christie under commission by producer Lee Shubert in 1944.

The original script was played for one week in September 1945 at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse. Shubert then gave Christie the requested changes before he would take it to Broadway.

However, due to Christie’s busy schedule, she didn’t have time to look at the changes, and Shubert put her script away.

Welch and Robbins decided to do the play about a year ago, and, while researching more details of the play, they discovered the original script.

“We read the [original] script — we fell in love with it,” Welch said. “So, two weeks before we had auditions, we just decided we’re doing this.”

Before or during intermission Sunday, attendees got the chance to vote for who the victim and murderer were during an interactive display.

“The cast members love seeing [the votes] at the end of the night,” Robbins said.

Michael Davis plays Neville Strange, a well-known tennis player notable for his charming look and prideful attitude.

His character is involved in a love triangle with current wife Kay Strange and ex-wife Audrey Strange, who are played by Mandy Rausch and Kendall Snyder, respectively.

Davis recently moved from Louisiana to Denton and worked with productions before being cast for his role.

“So this character gets to take them on a journey of guessing, ‘Who is this guy?’ ‘Is he going to be the killer?’ Is he the victim?’” Davis said after Sunday’s performance. “They [the audience] have to pay attention the more as we go along. So, I liked how this character just had those layers about him … and take the audience on a roller coaster.”

The audience wouldn’t even know that Snyder, who plays Audrey Strange, hasn’t been in a theater show for about 12 years.

She took a break from theater to focus on family and life. This was also a Theatre Denton debut for Snyder, who is a theater director at a Prosper ISD middle school.

“[Audrey Strange] is definitely an overthinker,” Snyder said about her character after Sunday’s performance. “She feels a lot of guilt because she feels like a lot of things that she’s done are her fault with the past.”

Both directors said locals who want to see the show will need to buy tickets as soon as possible because tickets will sell out.

“I think that this is something that they’re not going to see anywhere else, or they haven’t seen anywhere else,” Welch said. “I don’t know what the future holds. Maybe people will start doing this play in the future. Who knows? … This hasn’t been done a lot in the past. This is going to be a first, so they actually need to come out and watch history being made in Texas.”

Locals can purchase tickets online through Theatre Denton’s website.

108 episodes

Poems, essays, micro stories, and book reviews.

A Literary Cornucopia Luisa Morales-Molina

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Episode 106: C.S. Lewis: Influential Writer/Intellectual Giant

C. S. Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and without a doubt one of the most influential writers of his day. He might be best known for “The Chronicles of Narnia" which is a series of seven high-fantasy novels, written between 1949 and 1954 and published from 1950 to 1956. The series is considered a classic of children's literature and has been adapted for radio, television, the stage, and film. He wrote over thirty books both fiction and non-fiction which earned him a well-deserved place among the writers of his day and beyond.

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Episode 105: Neil Gaiman: The Master of Modern Fantasy

For those into fantasy, horror, science fiction, and graphic novels, Neil Gaiman is the writer of choice. Influenced in part by C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Edgar Allan Poe, it is not surprising that his work has earned him fame. 

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Episode 104: P.D. James: Crime Novelist

P.D. James made a significant contribution to the detective fiction genre. She began writing crime novels when she worked as senior administrator in the National Health Service (NHS). She had a very unique way of depicting the criminal mind. Her detective fiction was a reflection of society's fears, anxieties, and moral dilemmas during her time. Those have not changed much. This episode provides details of this crime novelist’s life.  ~~A Literary Cornucopia

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Episode 103: Agatha Christie: Mystery Writer Extraordinaire

Dame Agatha Christie was a prolific mystery writer. Novels, short stories and plays all involved plots with many twists and turns. Even her own life had its mystery when she disappeared for eleven days! We'll never know if it was a publicity stunt.

• APR 28, 2024

Episode 102: Christina Rossetti: A Woman of her Time

Much has been said about this poet. I can only add that after re-reading her poetry, I realize how unique she was not only as a poet but as a woman of strength in many ways. The Victorian Period produced two notable poets: Elizabeth Barrette Browning and Christina Georgina Rossetti. Each had her own style but of the two, Christina has left an indelible mark in my soul. ~~LMM

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Cognitive-linguistic manipulation and persuasion in Agatha Christie

Alexander, Marc Gabriel (2006) Cognitive-linguistic manipulation and persuasion in Agatha Christie. MPhil(R) thesis, University of Glasgow.

This thesis presents some of the many methods which Agatha Christie uses to manipulate readers away from and towards the eventual resolutions of her fiction. It draws on a variety of linguistic, psychological, narratological and stylistic models to describe the specific techniques employed by Christie to manipulate and distract her readers.

The research undertaken employs practical studies in schemata, scenario-dependence, depth of cognitive processing, rhetorical-structural persuasion, unreliable narration, social cognition theories of character attribution, and ideas from the study of mind style to analyse manipulation in some of Christie’s most notable works. These works include the novels Murder on the Orient Express, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Death in the Clouds, Cards on the Table and The ABC Murders, in addition to lesser-known short stories from The Thirteen Problems and Poirot Investigates.

More specifically, following the introduction, the analyses in Chapter 2 operate through models of the psychological processing of texts and the way that linguistic indicators are interpreted by readers. ‘Red herrings’ and ‘buried clues’ are defined and examined using cognitive theories of schemata (information networks), scenario-dependence and a reader’s depth of processing. This is followed by Chapter 3, a rhetorical and structural analysis of persuasive practices within an extract of Christie’s fiction, where her detective Hercule Poirot attempts to convince both the assembled characters and the novel’s reader of the necessary truth of the solution he is presenting. In this chapter I introduce my own adaptation of Rhetorical Structure Theory designed for analyses of long extracts of a narrative text is also introduced. Chapter 4 looks at narratological and cognitive methods of describing character and narrator unreliability and ambiguity, through studies of an unreliable narrator, the nature of some witnesses’ minds within different novels, and the presentation of the ambiguous thoughts of an important suspect using techniques taken from the study of mind style.

The thesis aims primarily to describe and illustrate in a systematic manner a selection of the many different ways in which Christie manipulates readers, and points the way to other techniques of this sort. The breadth of the frameworks employed is intended to emphasise the range of Christie’s techniques, and to demonstrate that detective fiction contains many uses of complex manipulation which would bear further study.

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Manipulating Readers: The Novels of Agatha Christie

• Open Access
• First Online: 13 July 2023

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• Sarah J. Link 3  

Part of the book series: Crime Files ((CF))

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This chapter analyzes lists in novels written by Agatha Christie, exploring how they invite readers to adopt certain patterns of thinking. The form of the list is presented as a cognitive tool for problem solving, both by Christie’s fictional detectives and as a possible starting point for investigations conducted by the reader. Christie systematically uses lists and their affordances to mislead readers through playing with their genre expectations. This way, she achieves surprise effects and is able to create suspense. Genre expectations prestructure the gaps in the text and thus determine the most likely patterns in which these gaps will be filled. Christie uses the list as a device that becomes tied to her readers’ expectations about order structures in this genre, and she consciously employs the formal structures of her texts to play with her readers’ assumptions.

You have full access to this open access chapter,  Download chapter PDF

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) is one of the best known crime writers of (and beyond) the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction and has been labeled “one of the greatest reader-manipulators to be found in the various genres of fiction” (Alexander 2009, 25). Christie’s novels, especially those about her two famous detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, continue to enjoy lasting popularity among readers, and her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) is ranked fifth among the 100 Top Crime Novels Selected by the Crime Writers’ Association (1990).

John Lanchester, in the London Review of Books , surmises that Christie’s lasting popularity lies more in her mastery of form than in the literary qualities or the actual plots or outcomes of her novels (2018, n.p.). Footnote 1 He argues that Christie’s “career amounts to a systematic exploration of formal devices and narrative structures” rather than an in-depth exploration of character psychology (ibid.). The form of the list features prominently in many of Christie’s crime novels and frequently plays a central role in manipulating readers’ attention and expectations.

While the previous chapter examined from the perspective of reception how readers interact with the lists featured in dossier novels, this chapter will take a closer look at the levels of narrative and character representation. The first part of this chapter discusses how the narrative structure of Christie’s novels makes use of the affordances of the list form to manipulate reader attention and evoke patterns of thinking that invite readers to draw misleading conclusions. The surprise endings of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express (1934) will serve as prominent examples of this strategy. Such manipulations of the reader will then be discussed in the context of the fair play principle that governs detective fiction from the Golden Age.

Christie, however, not only uses lists to manipulate her readers but also has her detectives frequently make and refer to lists as tools to structure their thoughts and to break down complex problems into compartmentalized and manageable parts. The second part of this chapter examines how Christie’s investigators use the list form’s fragmented structure. Death in the Clouds (1935), A Murder Is Announced (1950), and Hickory Dickory Dock (1955) all exemplify how Christie’s detectives employ lists to either gain an overview over or impose their reflections on seemingly disparate pieces of evidence.

In their function as memory aid and notation system, these lists can also provide access to the detective’s thoughts and serve as physical evidence of the detective’s penetrating gaze and their capability to restore order to a seemingly chaotic world. Christie’s later novels employ the same patterns of listing to self-referentially make fun of the genre’s very obsession with classification, compartmentalization, and the reduction of complexity.

Manipulating the Reader: Creating Patterns of Thinking

“Form,” according to Karin Kukkonen, “works as a pattern of thinking” (2013, 162). Such patterns, she argues in the tradition of New Formalism, are “produced by the text in the reading process” (ibid.). The form of the list, when encountered by readers in a text, evokes very specific patterns of thinking, as, for example, the assumption that relevance is a defining criterion for including something in a list. The analytical context that detective fiction situates itself in suggests that readers attempt to identify a common feature that the items assembled on a list share.

Common features such as stolen goods or suspects , or even something as broad as evidence , provide the reader with a caption for the list that allows them to contextualize it. If the text does not disclose such a feature or connecting principle, the list form invites readers to find a pattern which renders the items as a coherent set. Thus, the very simple form of the list, “paradoxically, requires highly complex decoding strategies” (von Contzen 2017, 232). Footnote 2 Many of Christie’s novels rely on the complexity of such decoding mechanisms and employ the form of the list, in combination with carefully placed ambiguities that leave references and causalities undefined, to play with readers’ expectations and invite them to make misleading assumptions. It is the contrast between the expectations thus raised and the stunningly unexpected solution to the mystery that creates the surprise effect for which many of Christie’s novels have been praised.

Christie’s crime novels make ample use of the list form and explore the manipulative potential of the gaps and loose syntactic connections that award the form of the list its “computationality,” its ability to easily reorder and repurpose elements (Stäheli 2011, 92). Christie frequently employs lists to direct or misdirect her readers’ attention and makes use of the reader’s assumptions about relevance and categorization that lists usually afford to lead her readers astray. Such manipulations can take place on both the levels of fabula and suzhet. Footnote 3

Form and Attention

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is one of Christie’s best known works and provides a number of examples of how form can (mis)direct attention and manipulate readers and characters alike. The novel is narrated by the local doctor, Dr. Sheppard, who also features as a character and takes on the role of detective Hercule Poirot’s assistant during the murder investigation. The stunning conclusion to the novel unmasks Dr. Sheppard as the murderer. Sheppard, in his role as narrator, displays no signs of unreliability, and his story world position as detective Hercule Poirot’s assistant gains him the reader’s trust from the beginning. This ensures that the reader’s analytical capacities and attention will be focused on other characters when looking for suspects. Sheppard’s deceptions frequently rely on readers’ assumptions about form and conventions, and the form of the list affords a particular manipulative potential through its capacities for omissions and summarizing.

Stephen Knight has pointed out that in the novels of Agatha Christie, “the cause of disorder […] is consistently a matter of major personal betrayal” (2004, 91). This is seldom truer than in the case of Ackroyd, Footnote 4 where this betrayal takes place on two levels simultaneously. On the level of the fabula, the village’s trusted doctor and the detective’s (seemingly) trusted assistant are responsible for the very disorder it is his responsibility to resolve. Furthermore, on the suzhet level, Sheppard betrays the reader’s trust that a first-person narrator who displays no signs of unreliability will share their knowledge and observations (however limited) with the reader. Carl Lovitt even goes as far as to argue that besides undermining the trust of his community as a character, Dr. Sheppard as a detective fiction narrator “threaten[s] to undermine the conventions of the genre” (1990, 72). Indeed, by making a first-person narrator the murderer, Christie, breaks the first (and by implication most important) of the ten commandments Ronald Knox established in his “Detective Story Decalogue,” Footnote 5 which states that the criminal cannot be someone whose thoughts the reader has access to (see 1976, 194).

In chapter 23, toward the end of Ackroyd, Dr. Sheppard reveals that the novel the reader has been following is the written version of his personal notes regarding the investigation; this turns the entire novel into a diegetic text that exists as an object within the story world. This move strongly implies that the reader now knows (absolutely) everything Sheppard knows and considers as relevant to the investigation—an assumption which practically excludes him as a suspect. Moreover, such a “diegetization of the narrative” (Gibelli 1992, 390) Footnote 6 makes the table of contents part of the text rather than the paratext and implies that Sheppard is responsible for the labeling of chapter titles. Footnote 7 This works to justify the narrator’s deception (of the reader) and marks it as a necessity of the plot (since detective Poirot has access to the manuscript and Sheppard needs to conceal his deeds). Furthermore, reading the novel as a manuscript composed by Sheppard functions to retrospectively characterize him and put on display Sheppard’s arrogance and sense of superiority in assuming his involvement in the crime would go unnoticed by his narratee.

Even though Sheppard’s deception is motivated by the plot, a first-person narrator who deceives the narratee—the reader of Sheppard’s manuscript, in this case both the reader and detective Poirot—“violate[s] the cooperative principle of pragmatics,” as Emanuela Gutkowski points out in her excellent article “An ‘Investigation in Pragmatics’: Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” (2011, 52). Gutkowski discusses how readers will assume a causal link between statements that directly follow one another. Her example is from chapter 18, where the reader is led to assume a direct connection between a detail of the investigation (regarding the character Charles Kent) which Dr. Sheppard expresses his confusion about and another detail (regarding the murder) that Poirot, who at this point already suspects Sheppard, has recently figured out. This leads readers to assume that the statements about Sheppard’s confusion and Poirot’s musings both refer to Charles Kent and that Sheppard’s confusion concerns the identity of the murderer (see 220). Thus, Sheppard diverts the reader’s attention from himself by means of omissions and careful arrangement of the sequence of statements rather than direct lies. Footnote 8 Though this specific example does not involve a list, the principle of association by proximity is fundamental to how lists work and create meaning, and Sheppard is not the only character who uses this to his advantage.

Christie also has detective Poirot use this very principle of association by proximity in a list to trick Dr. Sheppard (and the reader) by diverting their attention—and thus their suspicions. Toward the end of the novel, Poirot asks Sheppard to invite a number of suspects for a “little conference”:

‘I have a commission for you, my friend,’ he said at last. ‘Tonight, at my house. I desire to have a little conference. You will attend, will you not?’ ‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘Good. I need also those in the house—that is to say: Mrs Ackroyd, Mademoiselle Flora, Major Blunt, Mr Raymond.’ (249)

The reader (and also Dr. Sheppard, who is unaware Poirot already knows of his guilt) automatically assumes that the four names that follow the colon are those of the people to be considered suspects, especially because they immediately follow the tag “those in the house” that additionally ties them together as a group. Even though the previous sentence makes clear that Poirot and Sheppard will also be present for this conversation (“You will attend, will you not?”), they will likely not be considered suspects by the reader. Sabine Mainberger points out that making something part of a list is a binary yes/no decision because in a list, “there is no compromise between inclusion and exclusion of an[y] element” (2003, 37). Footnote 9 Poirot’s trick, thus, depends on a mismatch between form and content, in which the form of the list suggests a boundary that the content (i.e., the group of suspects) disregards.

Christie plays with the reader’s assumption that the list that follows the colon and the tag “those in the house” is a self-contained entity independent of its immediate context. This passage relies on a (common) strategy of reading that considers lists and list-like descriptions as relatively independent of the text that surrounds them (see, e.g., Mainberger 2003, 114) and counts on readers not connecting Sheppard’s presence at the “conference,” which is clearly indicated in the sentence immediately preceding the list, with Sheppard’s inclusion in the circle of suspects. Therefore, the reader will likely be caught by surprise when the list of suspects Poirot presents to the assembled group a couple of pages later includes Sheppard (see 270).

Lists, Urs Stäheli argues, have a “naturalization effect”; we are inclined to accept the contents of a list without much questioning because a list “produces a reality of its own” (2016, 15). The form demands that we perceive this reality as a self-contained entity that can be considered and made sense of separately from its surroundings. Christie uses the reader’s awareness of the list’s properties and affordances (based on experience with the form in scientific and everyday contexts) to induce misleading assumptions about connections between the elements of her text.

This strategy can be observed not only when having a look at select passages that employ lists but also when considering the use of lists throughout the entire novel. “[D]evices such as notes, prefaces, and indexes,” Edward Maloney writes in Footnotes in Fiction , “have all been used by writers to direct their readers towards particular interpretive strategies or conclusions” (2005, 20), and they thus draw attention to the close interconnection between certain forms and certain reading strategies. Christie’s novels employ the reading strategies that lists elicit to cleverly manipulate her reader’s attention. Lists function “as a cultural technique for creating clarity” (Stäheli 2011, 87), Footnote 10 and Christie’s narrators and characters make use of this to misleadingly evoke the impression of such clarity while, in fact, omitting relevant items or placing them in the vicinity of the list instead of including them within the formal unit of the list itself.

The short, concise form and the easy overview that lists provide over the items they include invite the reader to compare and cross-reference their contents, especially if several lists concerning the same or similar topics are provided. Footnote 11 Ackroyd provides the reader with several lists of suspects over the course of the investigation, most of which do not feature Dr. Sheppard. He is not among the suspects inspector Raglan lists in chapter eight (97–98), nor is he among the people who will inherit enumerated in chapter ten (118), nor does he feature in the list of people who will profit from Ackroyd’s death in chapter fifteen (182). Not only do those lists not make Dr. Sheppard visible as a suspect to the reader; they also (potentially) redirect the reader’s attention to another name that does feature on all three of those lists: that of the housekeeper Miss Russell. The housekeeper moreover features as the last item on the list of people who visited Dr. Sheppard on the day of the murder (141), a position that draws particular attention, especially since none of the other names listed there have been mentioned previously.

Having a list item such as a suspect’s name feature on several related lists in different places throughout the novel creates the impression of heightened relevance in the reader’s mind. An item that comes up several times appears as a more reliable clue as well: the rhetorical force of repetition is frequently employed in lists to effect a “leveling of contrariness and incompatibility in the items enumerated” (Mainberger 2003, 28). Footnote 12 This strategy can also be observed in Hickory Dickory Dock (1955), where a list of questions starting with “Who” alternates with the repetition of the name of one suspect over and over again: “Nigel Chapman.” The name is spelled out in full eleven times throughout the dialogue between Poirot and a police inspector on that page, and the parallel structure of the questions in the last paragraph even further amplifies the effect (see 229). The repetition of Nigel Chapman’s name in between the parallelistic questions directs attention away from details that do not fit the theory that he should be the killer by signposting that several suspicious instances do connect with that name. The formal structure of repetition veils inconsistencies by suggesting that Nigel Chapman is not only the obvious answer to the questions asked but also the only possible answer. Since rhetorical strategies suggest that frequency correlates with importance, the repetitions that draw attention to Miss Russell in Ackroyd and Nigel Chapman in Hickory deflect attention from incongruities and other suspects (such as Sheppard) that might otherwise draw the reader’s interest. Footnote 13

Relevance and Visibility

Dr. Sheppard’s (non-)appearance on Ackroyd ’s suspect lists (as well as the repetition of Nigel Chapman’s name in Hickory ) shows that the criterion of visibility is inseparable from the form of the list and offers itself as a strategy for reader manipulation. Urs Stäheli argues that lists, through the process of selection that is inextricable from them, set certain items apart from their contexts in order to highlight them and therefore determine what is made visible. Footnote 14 This “constitutive function of list” ensures that what is listed is automatically considered relevant (Stäheli 2017, 364). Because of this equation of visibility with relevance and its affordance to represent information (seemingly) objectively and concisely, the form of the list offers itself as a means of conveying false clues. These, for example, invite readers to ascribe high relevance to details which ultimately turn out not to be related to the main investigation.

This is, for example, the case in Death in the Clouds (1935), where Poirot gains possession of a victim’s notebook, which seems connected to several suspects’ activities. The lists of encrypted names contained therein and printed in the book for the reader to inspect, however, provide no hint to the identity of the murderer, even if it is possible for the reader to decrypt large parts of the list and match the entries with suspect names:

CL52. English Peeress. Husband. RT362. Doctor. Harley Street. MR 24. Forged Antiquities. XVB 724. English. Embezzlement. GF 45. Attempted Murder. English. (113) Footnote 15

The entry for attempted murder, however, which seems to hold the most relevance for the investigation, cannot clearly be matched with any of the suspects. This list plays with the reader’s assumption that the information provided in lists is relevant and that, hence, it should be possible to match the suspects with the entries in the notebook. When Poirot resolves the case, he makes no reference back to the unmatched notebook entry and thus leaves open the question of whether the attempted murder entry in the notebook can be attributed to any of the suspects. The listed information turns out to be irrelevant.

In a similar manner, both Orient Express and Ackroyd feature tabular lists drawn up by detective characters, which elucidate the whereabouts of certain persons around the time the crime was supposedly committed. Since these lists are visually set apart from the continuous text around them and thus highly visible, they invite readers to consider them as summaries of relevant information that a (proficient) reader will be able to make sense of and draw conclusions from. List items thus presented are likely to be understood as “building blocks for a coherent and meaningful narrative” (see von Contzen 2017, 236), Footnote 16 and readers will try to detect meaning and construct such a narrative around the supposed clues thus assembled.

The tabular lists in Ackroyd and Orient Express , however, flout these expectations. Both lists appear as summaries of hitherto known clues assumed to be relevant to the solution of the crime, but the Ackroyd list does not even include the guilty party in its account of whereabouts (see 97–98), and the Orient Express list presents a temporal succession of events that ends almost an hour before the crime was actually committed (see 111; 265). As was the case with Poirot’s enumeration of suspects in Ackroyd discussed above, these lists invite the reader to be “distracted by content and […] not question the logic of the list—how it frames their thinking” (Young 2017, 63), in this case by making readers take for granted the relevance of the information provided. In the Orient Express list, the impression of relevance is reinforced by a character commenting on the list with the words “[t]hat is very clear” (111), which implies the list has provided him with new information or a new angle on the information presented that he can make sense of. In the case of Ackroyd , the physical space on the page between the list and the continuous text is turned into conceptual space between the list’s content and the surrounding passages that functions to distract readers from the presence and naming of the actual murderer in this scene.

Categorization

While the previously discussed examples invite readers to engage with details or draw conclusions which turn out to be irrelevant to the context of the list, my next example is concerned with framing and focus as created by categorization. The third and last section of Orient Express features profiles of all passengers who traveled on the train coach in which the murder was committed (see 205–208). Those profiles list the passenger’s name, country of origin, berth number, and traveling class, followed by the categories “Motive”—which is left blank for almost all of the suspects—“Alibi,” and, in most cases, “Evidence Against Him [/Her] or Suspicious Circumstances” (205–208):

Mary Debenham—British subject. Berth No. 11. Second Class. Motive: None. Alibi: Midnight to 2 a.m. (Vouched for by Greta Ohlsson.) Evidence Against Her or Suspicious Circumstances: Conversation overheard by H.P. and her refusal to explain same. (208)

This setup invites readers to compare the passengers’ profiles with regard to the listed categories in order to spot the detail that is odd and thus gives away the correct suspect.

These profiles give the appearance of working like an index that the reader can go back to in order to locate pointers to relevant pieces of information. According to Urs Stäheli, an index “provides signposts” to the reader and “points out what is worth seeing/reading” (2016, 17). The items that the index renders visible suggest that the relevant clue is to be found among the categories of “Motive, Alibi, or Evidence” that detective Poirot, the list-maker, deemed worth including for each suspect. By highlighting these three categories, Christie’s novel plays with the reader’s expectations of and experiences with identifying the correct suspect in detective novels. However, here, the category of motive is left blank for almost all suspects, and the categories of alibi and evidence do not contain relevant information, so a perusal of Poirot’s profiles cannot single anyone out. The sober and seemingly businesslike enumerations seem to “say everything without meaning anything” (Mainberger 2003, 118) Footnote 17 because the list form’s association with facticity and clarity veils the lack of interpretable content.

Since the twist of Orient Express reveals that all the suspects are guilty and have committed the crime collaboratively, the only reading strategy that can lead to success is finding out what connects all these profiles. But gaining relevant information from the profiles is doubly impossible for the reader: first, because the information on motives and others they promise to provide is incomplete and, second, because genre expectations prompt readers to look for one suspect who can be identified through singling out one detail, rather than finding out what all suspects have in common. Footnote 18 A successful reading necessitates a re-framing of the information and a different approach to processing data that is geared toward combination rather than selection.

That the meaning of a text is not fixed but at least partly depends on the reader’s expectations is a basic premise of Wolfgang Iser’s aesthetics of reception. Iser sees the meaning of a text as the product of an interaction between text and reader rather than a text-inherent property. According to Iser, (literary) texts consist of a number of narrative schemata that constitute a primary code, on the basis of which readers fill in the blanks left in the text with their horizon of expectations to create a secondary code (see 1978, 93). Iser even argues that a text can only have an impact on readers if it is not identical with their horizon of expectations (see ibid., 43). The way recipients make sense of a text is thus crucial to its meaning. Genre conventions, such as the idea that there is usually only one perpetrator in a detective novel, form an integral part of a reader’s horizon of expectations (see Jauss 2004, 1241) and therefore constitute an ideal leverage point for manipulating readers.

Orient Express relies on categorization-related manipulative strategies to highlight the diversity of the suspects and thus invites readers to consider them individually rather than as a group. The list of profiles discussed above highlights the passengers’ different nationalities in the profiles’ headings: “Hector MacQueen—American subject […] Conductor—Pierre Michel—French subject,” and so on (205). The list points out the passenger’s various nationalities and origins in close succession in order to emphasize their apparent differences over their possible similarities, and thus discourages the idea that they might be connected in any way but through the physical space of the train coach they share. This perceived difference also functions to strengthen the alibis they give to one another: “[t]hey can’t all be in it” (254), which various characters involved in the investigation stress repeatedly.

In his summary of the evidence preceding the big revelation, Poirot yet again stresses the different nationalities of the passengers, but this time, in a rhetorical backflip, he uses this enumeration as a rhetorical device to support his theory that ties the passengers together as a group: “[i]n America there might be a household composed of just such varied nationalities—an Italian chauffeur, an English governess, a Swedish nurse, a French lady’s maid and so on” (262). Marc Alexander performs a rhetorical analysis of this passage and concludes that the enumeration of passengers and their nationalities is used as a concrete example for Poirot’s otherwise rather lofty claims that only an American household could assemble people of such varied nationalities, and he argues that these examples form “the rhetorical thrust of the argument” Poirot is building (2009, 21). Listing and parallelism in this passage function as a rhetorical support structure for Poirot’s argument. The “and so on” at the end of the list turns the enumeration into what Alexander calls “a series example,” which implies that countless other points could be added to the list to further support the argument (2009, 21).

As the example from Orient Express shows, categorization lends itself to the manipulation of the reader’s attention and assumptions. A very basic approach to using categorization to such purpose is to veil the importance of a clue by subsuming it into a higher-level category. This is, for example, used in Ackroyd (see 31) and Crooked House (1949) (see 175), both of which include an important item in their enumeration that is subsumed under its hypernym rather than made visible as the basic level term right away. Footnote 19 In Crooked House , the object, a chair, is mentioned only two pages later, but in Ackroyd , several chapters go by before the object—the dagger that will be used as a murder weapon—shows up again, divorced from the context it was originally enumerated in. This constitutes “a twist on the more usual detective fiction device of nesting a significant object—a clue—in amongst insignificant ones” (Stewart 2019, 185) and makes it harder to connect the list item to the clue the original context provides.

Variations on the technique of nesting a significant object among insignificant ones can also be observed in Clouds and in Hickory . Clouds uses the sheer mass of objects enumerated over four entire pages under the heading of passengers’ belongings to conceal the two objects that can prove the murderer’s guilt (see 83–86). Detective Poirot’s comment (following this list) that the list “seems to point very plainly to one person as having committed the crime” (87) remains the only hint to the reader that a suspicious object can be identified among the passengers’ belongings. Readers are provided with no guidance as to what kind of clue or which category of object they are supposed to look for and thus lack the analytical tools to successfully process the mass of information they are confronted with. The passage plays with the issue of visibility discussed above and illustrates the kind of interpretative glitch that can result from what Mainberger designates as a reader’s “insufficient familiarity with the functional context” Footnote 20 of the list, that is, a lack of knowledge about the principle(s) that induced the creation of the list (2003, 19).

Hickory takes yet a different approach to concealing clues among list items. The plot of the entire novel is based around the circumstance that objects which initially appear together in a single list are, in fact, to be attributed to two different lists, which record the involvement of three different people. The disentanglement of what belongs on which of these lists is the central problem to be solved in this novel:

Evening shoe (one of a new pair) Bracelet (costume jewellery) Diamond ring (found in plate of soup) Powder compact Lipstick Stethoscope Ear-rings Cigarette lighter Old flannel trousers Electric light bulbs Box of chocolates Silk scarf (found cut to pieces) Rucksack (ditto) Boracic powder Bath salts Cookery book. ( Hickory , 9)

This list is initially presented to Poirot in the above order, labeled as an enumeration of stolen goods. When confronted with this list, the characters discuss the “totally unrelated nature of the objects” (10) and try in vain to come up with a principle that connects them all—with what Madeleine Frédéric calls a “synthetic formula” (1986, 106) Footnote 21 to comprise the enumerated items. Frédéric argues that enumerations tend to be governed by a semantic principle that unifies the constituent items and renders them recognizable as part of a semantic field that functions like a caption or heading for the enumeration (see ibid.). If such a synthetic formula is not (or not satisfactorily) provided, readers will try to come up with one themselves to make sense of the list. This is exactly what Poirot attempts when he is first confronted with this “haphazard collection” (11). He points out that “[w]hat is so intriguing is all the different categories represented here” (13) and immediately engages in coming up with a classification system that sorts the items into more coherent groups. His ordering system hinges on the semantic principle of value. He divides the items into “small trifles” (13) of little value that are connected to vanity, things that can be sold for a profit (such as the stethoscope), and “things that it would seem were not worth stealing,” such as the light bulbs. He also remarks that the cut-up silk scarf fits neither of his categories and seems to be the result of a “deliberately vindictive” action (15).

Interestingly, the principle that eventually enables Poirot to reorder the list and separate the items relevant to the investigation from the ones merely stolen by a girl to draw her love interest’s attention (marked in italics below) is temporal succession. Footnote 22 Again, the theme of (in)visibility plays a crucial role in determining the proper ordering principle that unlocks the clues contained in the list. Chronology is not a structuring principle that is made visible in the text: the physical and very visible nature of the objects themselves distracts from the invisible principles of temporal succession that readers are aware of but do not consider. As a possible theme, chronology is not discussed in the text until Poirot asks to have the initial list rearranged.

The restructured version of the list is reprinted in full on pages 166–167 of the novel. The space in which this rearrangement is allowed on the page promotes the importance of this discovery and suggests that the reordering of items is not to be seen as a mere repetition of previously known information but rather as a new and important clue. Indeed, the reordered chronological list already hints that three rather than two parties must be involved in the events:

Rucksack (Len Bateson’s) Electric light bulbs Bracelet (Genevieve’s) Diamond ring ( Patricia’s ) Powder compact (Genevieve’s) Evening shoe (Sally’s) Lipstick (Elizabeth Johnston’s) Ear-rings (Valerie’s) Stethoscope (Len Bateson’s) Bath salts (?) Scarf cut in pieces (Valerie’s) Trousers (Colin’s) Cookery book (?) Boracic (Chandra Lal’s) Costume Brooch (Sally’s) Ink spilled on Elizabeth’s notes. ( Hickory , 166–167, highlights mine)

In the above quoted list, the three constitutive elements are marked as follows: italics indicate the items related to the love interest, plain writing items are related to a drug smuggling business and efforts to conceal the smuggler’s identity, and the underlined items hint at the involvement of a third party drawing the strings in the background.

The chronologically reordered final list Poirot receives omits two of the previous items that are related to the love interest but also contains the additional item “Ink spilled on Elizabeth’s notes” (167) that calls into question the synthetic formula chosen earlier as a header since it fits none of the object-related categories. The additional item contributes to changing Poirot’s view on the case, since it necessitates a rethinking of the synthetic formula that ties the items together. Sabine Mainberger has pointed out that most categorization systems are fluid and that adding additional items to the list will often draw attention to the arbitrariness of the previous classification because the new item can easily be integrated into the list once a different connecting principle is chosen (see 2003, 53). Once the stolen goods ( italics ) are edited out of the above quoted list, what remains can be subsumed under evidence for the involvement of the character Nigel Chapman, and the list now functions as a written proof thereof. With the new order, the list thus also gains the new purpose of identification.

Despite the flexibility of the form, lists invite us to think in categories. Detective fiction places great emphasis on the shared features or properties of objects in the formation of these categories. Such an approach to categorization advocates a “rationalistic dictate” (ibid., 53) Footnote 23 which the entire genre buys into. This kind of pattern of thinking is predestined to avail itself of the form of the list to demonstrate its practicability and inevitability. With its tight focus on ordering structures and obsession with the “proper order” of things (148) and with its numerous discussions and deliberations about categorization strategies, Hickory could be read as a meta-commentary on the hidden mechanisms that govern detective fiction. Restoring the chaos that the seemingly unrelated list items represent to this proper order rests on detective Hercule Poirot. That such a miraculous restoration of order is possible is taken for granted as one of the core assumptions of the detective fiction genre. Even before it is clear that the list will become the basis for a murder investigation, Poirot shows interest in the puzzle it poses because it is his function in the story to solve such puzzles. Chapter 2 states that “Poirot knew quite well that somehow and somewhere there must be a pattern [in this list]” (16) and thus demonstrates the genre’s strong ties to what Mainberger designates as a rationalistic dictate.

Christie expertly makes use of (and sometimes deliberately breaks) these genre rules and relies on the reader’s unthinking acceptance of them to set up manipulative plot structures and achieve her surprise effects. Be it the assumptions that classifications are fixed that she plays with in Hickory , or the assumption that lists present relevant information and only have to be put in the right order to reveal their secret that she plays with in the encrypted notebook in Clouds , Christie is keenly aware of her reader’s ideas about genre rules and ordering mechanisms, which so frequently show themselves in the genre’s lists. “[E]numerative structures” in particular, Eva von Contzen argues, “require the reader’s input in order to be rendered meaningful” (2021, 49), and according to Wolfgang Iser, readers “cannot help but try and supply the missing links that will bring the schemata together in an integrated gestalt” (1978, 186). List structures are thus a particularly effective means of manipulating readers’ expectations.

The Fair Play Rule

When Marc Alexander discusses Christie’s Orient Express , he remarks that detective fiction could be considered a “core genre of manipulative writing” (2009, 13); yet, the rule catalogs from and general agreements on the so-called Golden Age Footnote 24 of detective fiction state fair play with the reader as their most important principle. This section shall discuss how such contrary impulses can be reconciled.

The expression fair play serves as an umbrella term for all the detailed rules that the rule catalogs of the Golden Age (discussed in Chap. 2 ) put on record. If, however, one takes a closer look at Ronald Knox’s “Detective Story Decalogue” or the points that feature in the “Detection Club Oath,” rules such as “No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used” or “No accident must ever help the detective” (Knox 1976, 195) seem more geared toward preventing deus ex machina solutions and sloppy plotting than fairness in the OED sense of “Honesty; impartiality, equitableness, justness; fair dealing” with regard to the reader ( OED , s.v. no 6).

The reader, in fact, only features in three of Knox’s ten rules, and only rule VIII has something to say about clues, the list-based element of the story that is the most frequent target of reader manipulation: “VIII. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader” (1976, 196). Knox’s wording suggests that clues should not be omitted from the text only to be produced out of thin air to support an explanation. The rule, however, carefully avoids statements that imply clues need to be contextualized or explained—the two operations reader manipulation is most often based on. A more sloppily worded variation of Knox’s commandment appears in the “Detection Club Oath.” It asks prospective members of the Detection Club: “[d]o you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader?” (Haycraft 1976, 198) and through the use of the word “conceal” invites interpretations that configure fairness as an absence of deception or ambiguity. If these rules are to have any authority over the realities of the genre, fair play has to be understood in a much broader sense: as a summons to avoid implausible explanations but allow for ambiguities.

In fact, many of the detective novels that apparently violate one or several of Knox’s rules—such as Christie’s Ackroyd —are ranked among the most popular specimens of their genre. This would suggest that readers do not mind or possibly even expect and enjoy being manipulated, as long as the solution they are presented with at least in hindsight proves to be plausible and motivated by the plot and clues the reader has followed.

In both their focus on problem solving and their often enumerative structure, in which suspect after suspect is questioned with regard to the resolution of a mystery, detective novels of the Golden Age, and especially those of Agatha Christie, bear resemblance to the text genre of the riddle. Riddles frequently describe their object in a series of brief characteristics, each of which contains a hint, and thus can be argued to possess “enumerative character” (Mainberger 2003, 98). Footnote 25 Detective fiction functions according to the same principle, as Mainberger also points out briefly. The characteristics enumerated in a riddle frequently seem to contradict one another (ibid., 99), as is also the case with clues provided to the reader in detective fiction. Both detective fiction and riddles afford heightened reader engagement through the inclusion of a number of such (contradictory or non-contradictory) characteristics. According to Mainberger, it is the explicit purpose of a riddle to provide clues that “suggest a certain solution and then create surprise by flouting the expectations they set up” (ibid.). Footnote 26 The same could be said about the Golden Age detective novel.

The close ties between these two text genres are founded in their affinity to the list form and its affordances. The enumerative structure in which riddle characteristics or witness testimonies are frequently presented confronts readers with an abundance of information and invites them to fill in the blanks left between individual items, characteristics, or bits of information. As elaborated above, the order and wording of such bullet-point-like information is often deliberately misleading and used to create surprise by revealing causal connections different from those the information initially seems to point to.

This reshaping of (causal) connections between items inscribes an undeniably playful element into both riddles and detective fiction that, paradoxically, raises the expectation that one’s expectations about the outcome will be defied. Since detective fiction is an essentially plot-driven genre, it heavily relies on suspense for its effect, which the constant play with expectations helps to create. Suspense results from ambiguity and the reader’s inability to get to the solution before the fictional detective does and therefore could be considered a more or less direct result of manipulating the reader through misleading their expectations. Footnote 27

But if being confronted with misleading information, surprise twists, and false clues is inscribed into the genre expectations for detective fiction, a closer look at what is meant by fair play under these circumstances is necessary. Fairness to the reader, in this case, is not to be understood as an absence of ambiguity but rather concerns the production of a solution that incorporates elements previously mentioned in the text and therefore aims at plausibility and story world logic.

A crucial distinction between the detective novels of the Golden Age and those detective stories that were published toward the end of the nineteenth century lies in the conceptions of knowledge that the logic of these texts is built around. Even though detective fiction is such a closely knit and easily recognizable genre, conceptions and representations of knowledge differ widely across different timelines and subgenres. In Golden Age fiction, knowledge (as a means of solving the puzzle and piecing clues together) tends to be text-inherent, that is, information necessary for arriving at the right solution has to be mentioned or at least hinted at in the printed text (suzhet). Furthermore, the analysis of evidence in Golden Age novels is based around circumstances which would be considered common knowledge by a majority of the readers. Stephen Knight, for instance, points out that most of the central clues in Christie’s fiction revolve around the realm of domestic activity (such as the proper time of year to light a chimney fire) rather than venture into complex laws from the realms of science (see Knight 1980, 109). Knox implicitly includes this conception of knowledge in his fourth commandment when he writes “[n]o hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end” (1976, 195). Elaborate scientific explanations and procedures (which, e.g., play a central role in Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke stories) are considered undesirable because they are likely to fall outside the realm of common knowledge the majority of readers will have access to. Footnote 28

Christie’s novels also play fair with their readers in the sense that they make clear what kind of knowledge they expect the readers to resort to and what kind of investigative work is to be performed. The Notting Hill Mystery discussed in the previous chapter, for example, requires the reader to compare and cross-reference information given at various points of the story and to reassemble the information given at various points into a chronological timeline that will reveal patterns and discrepancies. Christie’s novels, by contrast, provide an overview over the information mentioned at various points in the story in maps, tables, or summaries and thus take this kind of work out of the reader’s hands.

Clouds , for instance, contains a map depicting which passenger occupied which seat on the plane (the crime scene) that immediately follows the table of contents and thus signposts even before the story begins that diligence is not what this text asks of its reader. Similarly, Orient Express features a map of the train coach in which the crime was committed that indicates which passenger occupied which berth (see 76). Starting from the Golden Age, maps of the house or crime scene became a standard feature of the clue puzzle mystery (see Knight 1980, 109–110). This development testifies to the fact that Golden Age novels expect their readers to draw connections between pieces of information rather than task them with creating an overview of which information is available at which point in the story.

Lists as the Detective’s Tool: Creating Order

Lucie Doležalová has argued that “[i]n a literary context, lists seem to embody a lack of story; one often skips lists in novels because they do not seem to move the events forward” (2009, 1). In the Golden Age detective novel, it seems to be the other way around. Lists are used to summarize important plot points for the reader; they frequently contain or hide clues, and in the case of Agatha Christie, her fictional detectives use them as a means to order their thoughts. Since these lists promise the reader access to the detective’s thoughts and (through the medium of writing) function to give the detective’s reasoning process a physical shape, they draw rather than deflect the reader’s attention.

Representing Thoughts

When used as a tool by Christie’s detectives, lists are often the means of representing the progression of the investigator’s thoughts. Toward the end of Orient Express , Hercule Poirot writes down ten questions that give the chapter in which they occur its title and that he considers crucial for the solution of the case:

Things needing explanation. 1. The handkerchief marked with the initial H. Whose is it? 2. The pipe-cleaner. Was it dropped by Colonel Arbuthnot? Or by somebody else? 3. Who wore the scarlet kimono? 4. Who was the man or woman masquerading in Wagon Lit uniform? 5. Why do the hands of the watch point to 1.15? 6. Was the murder committed at that time? 7. Was it earlier? 8. Was it later? (210)

The order and grouping in which Poirot poses these questions grants the reader insight into his thought processes. Questions five through eight build upon one another and thus show a clear progression of thoughts. Question five suggests that the watch is an important clue, and Poirot’s successive questions first spell out the obvious implication of that clue and branch out from there to demonstrate that he finds the obvious interpretation suggested by question six misleading or unconvincing.

Furthermore, the disjointed syntax that leaves the relation between successive list items undetermined allows Poirot to explore alternative interpretations (see questions 2; 5–8) without having to deliver a coherent theory—a feat that is usually expected of detective characters. The list form, together with the phrasing as questions rather than statements, allows the reader a rare glimpse into Poirot’s thought processes without giving away his conclusions. Urs Stäheli considers it a unique affordance of the list form to offer an “ordering system that brings together heterogenous content without having to provide a foundational unity” (Stäheli 2011, 86). Footnote 29 In Poirot’s case, the numbered ordering system creates the impression that the detective has a clear overview over and is in control of the investigation without him having to give away details about specific conclusions that can be drawn from the list of questions. Poirot’s list both emphasizes the considerable number of missing links (and thus the difficulty of the task Poirot is confronted with) and highlights his capability to succeed at this task.

Briefly contrasting Poirot’s list with the considerations of his colleague and assistant M. Bouc shall further illustrate my point. In the chapter following the one that poses Poirot’s ten questions, the reader is granted insight into M. Bouc’s thoughts about the case. Bouc’s thoughts are presented in paratactical sentences of continuous text, frequently separated by “…” to mark pauses in thought and, at first glance, do not appear too different from Poirot’s list of questions:

Assuredly I must think. But as far as that goes I have already thought … Poirot obviously thinks this English girl is mixed up in the matter. I cannot help feeling that this is most unlikely … The English are extremely cold. Probably it is because they have no figures … But that is not the point. It seems that the Italian could not have done it—a pity. (216)

Although Bouc’s thoughts also revolve around the suspects and pose questions, the effect on the reader is one of confusion, disorder, and a lack of structure.

Through the numerous uses of the pronoun “I” as an indicator of Bouc’s opinion, the passage evokes the impression of speculation and stands in stark contrast to Poirot’s seemingly impersonal questions. The formal structure in which the passage is presented further reinforces this effect. With the “…” the text includes a typographical sign for an omission, a disconnection, or a missing link that draws attention to itself and evokes the impression that Bouc is unable to follow through with any particular train of thought. The invisible gaps in Poirot’s list, on the other hand—if they are noticed at all—rather convey the idea of highly condensed information. The graphical representation of Poirot’s questions in numbered list form as opposed to the continuous text used for Bouc’s thoughts makes Poirot’s list appear even more concise and to the point. The list form casts Poirot’s questions as “synecdochic,” meaning that the brevity of the items seems to conceal a nexus of wider implications, whereas Bouc’s thoughts appear rather “periphrastic” in their failure to arrive at the core of the problem (see Barney 1982, 191). Footnote 30 Poirot’s list, therefore, not only represents the content but also the ordered and structured quality of his thoughts.

Poirot’s list of ten questions is not only presented to the reader on the printed paper of the page; the novel also explicitly mentions that Poirot writes down on a sheet of paper both the list of questions and the list with the passengers’ profiles discussed above (see 205; 210). By making his thoughts visible through a written medium, the detective awards his reasoning process physical shape. A statement made in writing is generally considered more permanent than oral statements that can be more easily modified or disavowed.

Giving physical shape to his thoughts and preserving them in the form of a written artifact enables Poirot to allow his colleagues (and the reader) easier access to them. Poirot hands his written list of passenger profiles to Bouc to help his colleague “refresh [his] memory” (205) of the facts of the case. Additionally, he hands his list of ten questions to Bouc to provide him with a basic grid to anchor his considerations in. This way, Poirot offers his colleague an opportunity to reenact his reasoning process. In the context of detective fiction, where seeing as the detective’s primary means of perceiving and interacting with the empirical(ly perceptible) world is inscribed with such crucial ideological importance, this material aspect moreover contributes to making Poirot’s considerations appear more convincing.

In Christie’s detective novels, such a contemplation of facts, often in written down form, frequently replaces the need for taking actions. Stephen Knight even argues that “[h]ard work, activity, professionalism and the positivistic mysteries of contemporary forensic science,” which are so important to the stories of Dr. Thorndyke discussed in the following chapter, “are all thrown out together” in Christie’s crime stories and are replaced by “peaceful reflection,” which can reestablish order just as well (1980, 110). Footnote 31

The list of passengers’ belongings in Clouds (see 83–86) serves as a means for such reflection and is a case in point. The list is written down on a piece of paper that takes on an importance that transcends that of the material objects it represents. The full documentation of the passengers’ belongings and the matching of each object with its owner are of central importance to Poirot’s detective work in the novel; yet, Poirot never handles or even sees the objects the list represents. The written documentation of signifiers replaces the need for engagement with the actual signified, even for those objects that in the end turn out to have been instrumental to the crime. Footnote 32

Poirot’s list of ten questions, as well as the list of belongings in Clouds , exist as objects within the story world and are therefore situated on the level of the diegesis. Lists outside the diegesis that are directly addressed to the reader, such as the score sheet in Wheatley’s Herewith the Clues discussed in Chap. 3 , are rare in Christie’s novels, and it is even rarer that they contain clues. Footnote 33 With the exception of the table of contents, all lists discussed in this chapter that are used by detective figures exist as objects on the diegetic level. These lists are usually composed by Poirot and serve either as a memory aid to himself or as a visual representation of his observations used to summarize or point out case details for his colleagues or assistants. The typographical emphasis of the empty space around those lists among otherwise continuous text grants them and, moreover, turns these lists into signposts for the reader.

The reader is confronted with the exact same information in the exact same phrasing as Poirot’s assistants in the story world; therefore, or so the text seems to suggest, the reader also has the same (fair) chance of solving the puzzle as the detective’s assistants do. The seeming absence of the mediating instance of the narrator in these lists functions to involve the reader more deeply into the story. It suggests that the reader and the characters who are presented with Poirot’s lists in these instances share the position of narratee within the text’s communicative structure. This shared position creates the impression that readers can get involved in the investigation in the same way as the assisting characters and ties in with the idea posed above that investigative work requires no physical action but rather consists of the compilation and interpretation of text-based media. This may be one of the reasons for the extraordinary popularity of Christie’s clue puzzle novels. Lastly, the reader is likely to equate the list form’s apparent lack of mediation with a lack of deception and accept the list’s content at face value.

Concealing Thoughts

The illusion that lists lack a mediating instance can not only be used to create facticity; it also works to obscure logical connections from the reader. This is used to build suspense in A Murder Is Announced (1950), where Christie’s spinster detective Miss Marple disappears suddenly and leaves behind only a list of clues without explanations. The list strongly suggests she has resolved the mystery yet leaves the readers and the characters who find it in the dark about the kinds of connections to be drawn between the items: “Lamp. Violets. Where is bottle of aspirin? Delicious Death. Making enquiries. Severe affliction bravely borne. Iodine. Pearls. Letty. Berne. Old Age pension” (256). Marple’s list has both the reader and the characters who find it at a loss. “Does it mean anything? Anything at all? I can’t see any connection” (256), one of the characters comments.

Lists “convert […] continuous material (e.g. narratives, arguments, descriptions) into discontinuous, isolated items” (Stäheli 2016, 14) and therefore can work as summaries for the list-maker while at the same time they defy interpretation by someone else. Stäheli’s argument revolves around how the standardization process that comes with indexing items can be a powerful tool for producing knowledge and exerting control for those who create the index, and he also draws attention to the political implications of such invisible power structures (see 2016, 16). Although the political implications of listing and indexing are commonly disregarded in detective fiction, Christie’s lists regularly showcase the power that a list-maker (usually the detective) wields and the powerlessness that those unfamiliar with the list’s logic are confronted with.

Marple’s list suggests that the items she listed can be fitted into a coherent narrative that points to the guilt of a certain suspect. For her, the discontinuous bullet points on the list serve as shorthand for this narrative, but for an onlooker without insight into her thoughts, it is almost impossible to reconstruct her reasoning steps. Even though the list gives the impression of boxes being checked off a mental cross-reference list, syntactic connections that could draw attention to cause-effect logic or chronology remain absent. Moreover, the lack of a synthetic formula (see Frédéric 1986, 106) (such as a suspect’s name), which could provide an external reference point to serve as a guideline on how to connect the clues, prevents readers from recreating the logic that unifies the list from the perspective of the list-maker.

Eva von Contzen remarks that enumerative forms “exponentiate possible decoding mechanisms because they maximize gaps” (von Contzen 2017, 235). Footnote 34 Paradoxically, even though the lack of a guiding mediating instance allows more direct access to Miss Marple’s thoughts—the rapid succession of items simulates how quickly she fits the clues together—it, at the same time, leaves open a multitude of possible interpretative strategies without any leads on how to prioritize them. The immediacy of the list that seems to provide the reader with direct access to Marple’s thoughts at the same time serves to obscure the detective’s conclusions.

A lack of mediation and the absence of a synthetic formula are not the only ways in which lists can conceal the logic according to which they were compiled. Christie’s The ABC Murders (1936) presents a list of victims that flaunts an ordering logic that seems obvious in order to conceal the hidden logic according to which the murders are committed. As the title already suggests, the killer in The ABC Murders seems to follow the letters of the alphabet in picking out his victims: Alice Asher is killed in Andover, followed by Betty Barnard killed in Bexhill, followed by Sir Carmichael Clarke, who meets his end in Churston. At each of the crime scenes, an ABC railway guide is found, Footnote 35 which implies that the killer follows the railway guide’s alphabetical order in picking out his next victim and location. This initially prompts the conclusion that a serial killer is at work, whose killings meticulously follow an alphabetical order and are thus to be situated outside more conventional patterns of and motives for crimes, such as a personal relation between killer and victim.

Detective Poirot, however, eventually points out that the ABC pattern does not only deviate from conventional motives for murder but is also internally inconsistent Footnote 36 :

There was something haphazard about the procedure of A B C [the killer] that seemed to [Poirot] to be at war with the alphabetical selection […] To be consistent, the murderer should have chosen his towns in some definite sequence. If Andover is the 155th name under A, then the B crime should be the 155th also—or it should be the 156th and the C the 157th. (247–248)

The fact that the murderer’s choices within the strict alphabetical order of his killings seem random allows Poirot to see that the ABC order is used as a front to conceal a personal motive. Poirot picks apart the ordering structure of the crimes, and his close examination of the logic behind the list of victims enables him to unmask the killer and expose the ABC killing list as an imperfect construct to deflect attention from the one victim whose death afforded the killer personal gain. Footnote 37 At the same time, Poirot’s analysis emphasizes the criminal’s imperfect command of such ordering structures and contrasts it with Poirot’s mastery.

Breaking Down the Problem: Managing Boundaries

“[T]o list is to attempt to comprehend,” writes Stephen Barney (1982, 223) in his discussion of lists in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This is certainly true in the context of detective fiction, where lists not only work to manipulate the reader’s attention or to display the detectives’ thoughts, but also function as reasoning tools and structuring aids to facilitate detective work. The structuring properties of the list make it a fitting tool to draw clear boundaries around a subject matter within the space of a page and select and highlight what is relevant. At the same time, lists can be used to break larger problems down into smaller, tick-off-able topics and therefore make them appear more manageable.

It is a detective’s task to narrow down possible fields of inquiry and to compartmentalize information. A choice of focus that is too broad is detrimental to drawing accurate and sensible conclusions (see Gitelman 2014, 7) and will distract from the more relevant points of inquiry. The form of the list is an ideal tool for such compartmentalization because it operates on processes of selection that force the list-maker to make judgments of value and relevance in order to pick out from the mass of information the items which will yield concise results. Compartmentalizing information makes it appear more manageable, and drawing clear boundaries round a subject matter functions to establish clarity and order or at least the semblance thereof.

Poirot is not the only detective character who resorts to this investigative strategy. At the beginning of the murder investigation in Clouds , inspector Japp attempts to create an overview over the case that allows him to rank the suspects according to their possible involvement. For this, he picks two distinct categories on which he bases his deliberations: possibility—dependent on the situational factors of timing and proximity—and probability—recognizable motive and access to the means—that any particular suspect could have committed the crime:

This is where we stand. Jane Grey. Probability—poor. Possibility—practically nil. Gale. Probability—poor. Possibility—again practically nil. Miss Kerr. Very improbable. Possibility—doubtful. Lady Horbury. Probability—good. Possibility—practically nil. (79–80)

The list continues in ascending order, ending with the most likely suspects. The clarity and plausibility of the categories chosen veils the fact that the reasons for Japp’s assessment of a suspect as more or less likely to have committed the crime are not discussed and have to be inferred. It is the form rather than the content of Japp’s deliberations that lends it rhetorical force. Even though Japp’s assessment of the suspects turns out to be entirely inaccurate, the list’s “random sequence makes it apt for a display of formal order” (Barney 1982, 194) and thus serves to temporarily accomplish clarity despite its ultimate inaccuracy.

Japp’s act of listing goes beyond a mere description of the current state of the case. Even though his list shares with descriptions the property of creating an overview and painting a clear picture for his audience, it takes on an additional prescriptive function in suggesting actions to be taken in the further investigation (i.e., to first consider the more likely suspects). Even though lists and descriptions can overlap, “only the former are immediately recognizable and enactive as a skill and practice” (von Contzen 2018, 323) and thus stand out against mere description. Inspector Japp’s list transforms the information it is based upon through the act of writing. Spelling his deliberations out on paper awards them a durable quality that contributes to eliciting an affective response: his act of ordering affords a sense of mastery and security (see ibid., 324). Such mastery is a common skill ascribed to detective figures, and it is frequently tied to the ability to use lists for the purposes of order and categorization. Through the processes of selection and ordering, the list form suggest an intellectual pervasion of the material that is lacking in a mere description. Footnote 38

The act of listing takes on a quasi-performative quality in its capacity to create meaning: even if the classifications performed turn out to be incorrect later, they at least temporarily create order and satisfy both the characters’ and the readers’ need for clarity. The act of labeling options, facts, observations, or alternative actions, for example, by assigning them numbers or letters of the alphabet, imbues them with a significance that is uncoupled from interpretation and its results. As is the case with the list, the purpose of such labeling lies in creating a specific appearance rather than specific content. The form of the list constitutes “the ideal medium for the creation of new ordering principles” (Stäheli 2017, 367) because its minimal syntax makes it amenable to the inscription of ever new meanings. Numbering or alphabetical category labels (as, e.g., those used in Crooked House (see 127)) serve to compartmentalize information and stand in for and cover up the unnamed assumptions on which they are based. By referring to commonly accepted and widely used alphabetical or numerical ordering systems, such labels claim and repurpose the regulatory authority of those systems for their list’s specific context.

Strategies of compartmentalization similar to those the list affords can be realized in the continuous text through the use of punctuation. When detective Poirot delivers explanations about the circumstances of a crime (most frequently toward the end of a novel), he tends to do this in an enumerative style that is characterized by a fast-paced succession of facts and ideas that are separated by dashes with conspicuous frequency. These dashes signal pauses in Poirot’s explanations, which in turn prompt readers to fill in the blanks left by Poirot and supplement missing connections. Moreover, the dashes create the appearance of breathlessness and fast-flowing thoughts. They serve as visual markers to break up the text and give even continuous text paragraphs a list-like aspect (see e.g. Clouds , 207). Footnote 39 The discontinuous visual appearance the dashes create allows Poirot’s explanations to draw on the affordances of the list form, and the visual compartmentalization of information thus achieved supports the impression that Poirot’s explanations create order and coherence despite the gaps they leave.

Besides using lists for the compartmentalization of complex problems, Christie’s detectives also employ them for concretization—another strategy to reduce complexity. Concretization is a process which aims at giving abstract facts and circumstances a more tangible shape. It makes problems measurable and awards a degree of comparability that makes issues (appear) more accessible and thus more manageable. Lists are a frequently employed tool to perform such concretizations, because they “assemble disparate items into ordered classes of things, making problems amenable to targeted, cross-boundary intervention” (de Goede et al. 2016, 3). In their capability to create comparability or measurability, lists can thus work as a problem-solving strategy because they assemble a variety of items under a common denominator.

An example of this can be found in Clouds , when Poirot attempts to find out which of his suspects could have benefited from the victim’s death. To assess the effect the murder had on each suspect’s life, Poirot creates a list:

Miss Grey. Result—temporary improvement. Increased salary. Mr Gale. Result—bad. Loss of practice. Lady Horbury. Result good, if she’s CL 52. [i.e. if she corresponds to the encrypted notebook entry titled CL 52] Miss Kerr. Result—bad. (207)

This list frames the effect of the murder in terms of financial gain, which makes it possible to assess the result the crime has on each person’s life in terms of a concrete, binary plus/minus logic. Picking the gain or loss of money as the criterion that best demonstrates the effects of the murder makes this effect countable and comparable in terms of numbers that seem to provide an objective measuring standard. Framed like this, Poirot’s list functions to not only compile information, but to create new semantics “in producing contingent referentialities that come to appear as obvious” (de Goede et al. 2016, 5). Poirot’s list constitutes a concretization of the problem that allows him to divide his suspects into three subcategories (financial gain/loss/no effect) and thus opens up a new path for the investigation—to focus on the suspects who had something to gain.

Even though the concretized evaluation system thus created appears plausible at first sight, its logic does not hold up to closer scrutiny. Besides disregarding the emotional effects that can play into or result from involvement in a crime, Poirot’s list entirely disregards the proportionality of risk and results in committing a felony. The idea that someone might risk the severe sentence that a murder charge can result in for the sole reason of a temporarily increased salary seems absurd or even ridiculous. The comic effect that the detective fiction genre’s obsession with facts and figures can have will be discussed in the following section.

Lists and Humor: A Meta-commentary on Detective Fiction

Lists in Agatha Christie’s novels do not always serve the purposes of the investigation or of manipulating the reader’s expectations. Christie seems well aware of the abundance of lists she uses in her novels and of how closely the way her detectives use those lists tie them to categorization strategies and the realm of sober, objective investigative work and structured logical thought. Christie’s novels, however, do not only use the form of the list as part of the detectives’ methodological toolkit or as a device for reader manipulation. The form of the list also works to poke fun at detective fiction’s reliance on these very categorization strategies. This becomes evident in two distinct ways: first, the self-referential hints to categorization strategies in connection with detective work and the impulses to order and structure entangled with them, and second, the humorous use of the list for (stereotypical) characterization, which relies on the list’s tendency to restrict itself to essential and relevant details.

Toward the end of Clouds , shortly before Poirot reveals the identity of the murderer, he remarks to his audience that deaths can be divided “into two classes—deaths which are my affair and deaths which are not my affair” (248). Being used to Poirot’s elaborate explanations and categorizations, at this point in the story, readers expect to be given information that will illustrate circumstances of the crime or give hints to the identity of the murderer; quite possibly readers would expect a list of further subclassifications or at least a detailed explanation. But the categories Poirot proposes in this situation are tied only to his personal experience and thus directly opposed to the aspirations for objective categories one would expect to precede the methodical uncovering of a murderer’s identity. Such a statement seems to presuppose that detective Poirot is to be considered the central reference point for objective judgment, and it self-consciously ridicules the self-importance it displays. Poirot’s statement serves as a sort of tongue-in-cheek comment on his apparent omniscience and unbelievable investigative skills. It stands as a benevolent and self-referential nod to the fact that Poirot’s assessments always turn out to be correct and thus serves as comic relief while at the same time cementing Poirot’s extraordinary position and abilities.

The importance of categorization strategies and ordered thought is similarly satirized at the beginning of Hickory , where Poirot’s secretary Miss Lemon is introduced as a very efficient person. The reader learns that “the whole of Miss Lemon’s heart and mind was given, when she was not on duty, to the perfection of a new filing system which was to be patented and bear her name” (2). Miss Lemon’s unusual hobby foreshadows the concern with order and the importance of correctly putting together information around which the central plot of Hickory revolves. At the same time, by the novel’s publication date in 1955, most readers can be assumed to be familiar with the important role that ordering and correctly allocating information generally play in Christie’s detective novels. Miss Lemon’s concern with a system that will bring order out of chaos to the degree of “perfection” (2) can be read as a comment on both detective fiction’s obsession with bringing order to a chaotic world and the genre’s common disregard of character development or topics outside the immediate vicinity of the crime. Footnote 40

In a similar manner, Clouds humorously comments on the overly inflated importance of categorization and matching pieces of information in detective novels when the two characters Jane and Norman discover a list of things they have in common and on the basis of that list decide they are made for one another:

They liked dogs and disliked cats. They both hated oysters and loved smoked salmon. They liked Greta Garbo and disliked Katharine Hepburn. They didn’t like fat women and admired really jet-black hair. They disliked very red nails. They disliked loud voices, noisy restaurants, and negroes. They preferred buses to tubes. (141)

It is not only the random accumulation of unrelated details that have little to nothing to do with personality that is responsible for the humorous effect of this list. The matching of random interests seems to take on an almost mathematical precision in this excerpt. Quality, this list suggests, is achieved through an accumulation of quantity (that levels qualitative differences). Thus, this list makes the creation of a love match appear to function in the same way as the yes/no logic of matching clues to suspects that readers are familiar with from this genre. The list thus pokes fun at the overly analytical approach to the world that is so typical of detective fiction.

The second way in which lists and their properties are used humorously in the novels of Agatha Christie is as a characterization device. When Poirot interviews the writer Daniel Clancy in Clouds —at this point in the investigation one of his suspects—the reader first gets a description of Clancy’s rather chaotic room that serves to characterize the writer’s scatterbrained personality. A cursory glance at his room reveals “papers strewn about, cardboard files, bananas, bottles of beer, open books, sofa cushions, a trombone, miscellaneous china, etchings, and a bewildering assortment of fountain-pens” (159). The putting together of food items, instruments, professional equipment, leisure items, furniture, and tableware displays no apparent order other than that the items are Clancy’s property and thus has a satirical effect.

Satire, Stephen Barney remarks, “magnifies and deals in ‘disorderly profusion,’ [and thus] naturally uses lists” (1982, 217), which enable the putting together of many disparate items in a small space. The combination of disorder and the sheer number of items is responsible for the comic effect in the example above because the chaotic enumeration acts contrary to the reader’s expectation that a professionally successful adult must have a means of organizing their life and duties that continues to ensure their professional success. Furthermore, the variety of things listed implies a lack of focus that is also considered impedimental to a successful career. Lastly, the passage draws on the cliché that absentmindedness and the lack of social skills implied by the lack of order are typical traits of a writer’s personality. Footnote 41

This humorous nod at the writing profession is self-referential in a similar manner to the ways in which Poirot’s and Norman and Jane’s use of categorization and mathematical precision quoted above are. Those examples have characters applying the processes of categorization and comparison so typical for detective fiction to a context displaced from the investigation in order to make a meta-commentary on the importance but also inflated use of categorization and combination systems in detective fiction. The Clancy example takes this up on an even more abstract level: the list not only characterizes Clancy as a typical representative of the writing profession but also makes a comment on the writing medium (and its creators) in written form. Choosing the form of the list—which has long been known to be employed to stake claims to authority and truth for its objective depiction of facts (see Mainberger 2003, 102; 108)—for this seems to give the grossly stereotypical and exaggerated comment a serious undertone that contributes to the humorous effect.

Despite Christie’s innovative use of form, her works have drawn surprisingly little attention. A cursory MLA search yields only about 200 search results for “Agatha Christie” since 2000, compared to about 1500 for “Arthur Conan Doyle” for the same period.

If not indicated otherwise, all translations in this chapter are my own. The original phrasing will be provided in the footnotes. Here: “Die einfache Form ist paradoxerweise in der Dekodierung höchst komplex.”

For a discussion of these terms, see Sklovskij (1991, 170).

A list of abbreviations can be found at the beginning of this book.

For a discussion of Knox’s “Decalogue,” see chapter two (38–40).

“diégétisation du récit.”

Gutkowski discusses the possibility that one of the chapter titles could serve as a hint to the reader that Sheppard is deliberately misrepresenting factual connections (see 2011, 55).

Some German translations, such as the 1997 edition published by Goldmann (München), trans. Friedrich Pütsch, do not include the table of contents in the novel and furthermore leave out the chapter titles and replace them with ascending numbers. This takes away from the reader a potential clue and a means of characterizing Sheppard.

Sheppard does tell lies but only in direct speech. Thus, he cannot be considered an unreliable narrator. In his role as narrator, he correctly (if sometimes incompletely) represents events and dialogue as they occurred. According to Gutkowski, Sheppard “tells the truth, but can make the receiver catch an oxymoric ‘false reality’” (2011, 52), which represents a rather creative violation of pragmatics. Even Sheppard’s direct lies often exploit the affordances of form to enhance their credibility; he, for example, uses the list form’s ties to facticity to make a number of hypotheses he voices (that include statements he knows to be false) appear as objective observations (see 159–160).

“denn zwischen In- und Exklusion eines Elements gibt es keinen Kompromiß.”

“Die Liste fungiert […] als eine Kulturtechnik zur Herstellung von Übersichtlichkeit.”

The reading strategies of cross-referencing and comparison are discussed in more detail in chapter three: The Dossier Novel.

“[Ein] Untergehen der Gegensätzlichkeit und Unverträglichkeit des Aufgezählten wird forciert durch das Wiederholen von Elementen oder auch nur Strukturen—durch strengen Parallelismus.”

In Hickory , Nigel Chapman does turn out to be guilty, but the rhetorical firework described here successfully veils that he must have had an accomplice.

Stäheli makes his argument for travel guides, but it can be applied equally well to detective fiction.

Unless indicated otherwise, all emphases have been removed from quotations for better readability.

“Bausteine einer kohärenten und sinnhaften Erzählung.”

“Alles scheint gesagt—und das Wichtigste bleibt offen.”

Ina Hark makes a similar argument and argues that Christie’s strategy of concealing the identity of the guilty party in Orient Express depends on three points: (1) on “the reader’s familiarity with detective story conventions that dictate that some suspects must be innocent”; (2) on the fact that Christie “delays sketching in a complete picture of the Armstrong household” (the Armstrong case itself is only mentioned about a quarter into the book); and (3) on Christie “play[ing] up the international diversity of the passengers,” which makes it unlikely that they might be linked (see 1987, 40).

For basic level categories, see Rosch (1976).

“unzureichender Kenntnis des Funktionszusammenhangs.”

“la formule synthétique.”

When Poirot asks the original list-maker (Mrs. Hubbard) to chronologically reorder the items, the reader is also informed about the schema responsible for the items on the original list being presented in their initial order: Mrs. Hubbard first listed items that seemed peculiar to her and thus stuck out in her memory, and classified the rest as (in her opinion) either important or unimportant things (see Hickory , 138).

“Wer Klassenbildung auf die Frage nach gemeinsamen Merkmalen an den Elementen reduziert, unterstellt sich einem rationalistischen Diktat.”

For a definition and brief discussion of the term, see chapter two (30–32).

“[der] aufzählende Charakter vieler Rätseltexte.”

“durch zusammenpassende Hinweise eine Lösung nahezulegen und der so aufgebauten Erwartung am Ende überraschend zu widersprechen.”

It has been argued that many of Christie’s novels violate the principle of fair play. This claim, however, is based on a misinterpretation of the idea of fair play as an absence of deception, as discussed above.

Knox’s fourth commandment, in fact, seems to be geared directly at Austin Freeman, who is singled out in the commandment’s explanatory text as a negative example.

“nur die Liste bietet ein Ordnungsmodell an, das Heterogenes zusammenführt, ohne eine fundierende Einheit annehmen zu müssen.”

Stephen Barney uses these terms to define how lists convey information. According to Barney, lists “tend to be rather synecdochic than periphrastic” (1982, 191).

Knight also argues that the suggestion that private contemplation can solve a problem just as well as professional action provides an “illusion of effective self-help and self-sufficiency” that the clue puzzles of the interwar period frequently catered to (1980, 110). The idea that the reader can act as a detective in these clue puzzles and can be “clever enough—in play at least—to construct defences against a murderer” (Knight 2004, 88) further feeds into this idea.

In a similar manner, the novel as a written medium that invites readers to become active as detectives may evoke the impression that detection can be performed through contemplation alone and does not require the detective to get their hands dirty.

It could be argued that the extradiegetic table of contents in Orient Express provides a clue to the guilt of all suspects through its tripartite division, in which it groups together a chapter named after each passenger, one named after the conductor (who also turns out to be involved in the crime) and one each named after the murder weapon and the passengers’ luggage. Under the Heading of “Part 2 The Evidence” the grouping suggests a relation among the items grouped together that can be established through their direct involvement in or relevance for the crime.

“Im Enumerativen sind die Mechanismen der Dekodierung potenziert, da die Leerstellen maximal sind.”

The ABC railway guide lists railway stations in alphabetical order.

Compare, for example, the killing list in And Then There Were None (1939), where the victims are apparently killed in order of the magnitude of their guilt (245), an internal ranking logic which makes intuitive sense because it matches two linear developments.

This novel is another instance of an investigation conducted almost entirely through the examination of textual media rather than physical action or forensic analysis.

The security that Japp’s list elicits, however, is short-lived. Toward the end of his list, Japp includes detective Hercule Poirot as a highly likely suspect and thus problematizes the logic his list is based on. Japp’s list is an attempt at imitating the skill Poirot has at his command when making lists and categorizing evidence, and it ultimately demonstrates that he lacks Poirot’s mastery.

Janine Barchas makes a similar point in her essay about the use of the dash as a stylistic element in the work of Sarah Fielding. She argues that the dashes function to “convey […] information through graphic rather than verbal means” (1996, 633) and can provide additional information about the conversation by, for example, indicating a character’s emotional state (See 1996, 633–641).

The simplicity that comes with such a narrow focus in turn reinforces the idea of a manageable and order-able world that detective fiction promotes.

The characterization of a typical American in chapter eleven of Clouds similarly employs stereotyping in connection with typical properties of the list to achieve its comic effect (see 126).

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Link, S.J. (2023). Manipulating Readers: The Novels of Agatha Christie. In: A Narratological Approach to Lists in Detective Fiction . Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33227-2_4

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