I don’t own many of her books, but I love Agatha Christie.

I went through a fairly intense Christie phase from about twelve to thirty. When I read at the early end of that time, And Then There Were None in particular scared me absolutely rigid, and remains my favourite. I remain a devoted Poirot fan. (This is one of those occasions when I’ll admit to TV having an influence).

All that said, I think I find Christie’s detectives frightening.

It’s not their talent at identifying the murderer. It’s what happens once they have.

I remember becoming acutely conscious, as a teenager, of the person being led away by the police in the final pages: this wasn’t just the end of a puzzle. In many of Christie’s stories, that person was now destined for the gallows.

Compare that with Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes is certainly capable of being ruthless, but he is also capable of deciding that justice and the law are not quite the same thing. He will bend, evade or actually ignore the law when his conscience tells him that justice lies elsewhere. If you asked me about ‘side projects’ I’d like to eventually get round to, cataloguing the outcomes of Conan Doyle’s output is near the top of the list.

Philip Marlowe does something similar, in his own rather battered way.

Christie’s detectives are different. I find them … well, less human. More vengeful?

They discover the truth. They expose the guilty. And then, with unnerving implacability, they hand them over to the machinery of justice.

Which is why I rather like this image.

The frightening thing isn’t the sleuth. It’s the gavel.

The sleuth has simply made sure that it falls. And hits its target.

And when I pause to think about it, I feel that whilst Christie is undoubtedly the queen of the ‘whodunnit’, Conan Doyle adds a second question: why did they do it?

And, as a tutor who spends so much time demystifying ‘Assessment Objectives’ and mark schemes, this suddenly feels like familiar territory: take something complicated, and reduce it to the questions that actually matter.

Christie gives us the satisfaction of discovering WHO is guilty. 

Most of us also want to know HOW. 

Conan Doyle is often more interested in taking into account WHY a human being committed a crime.

Both give us the gavel.

One occasionally asks whether it ought to fall.

Over to you: what’s YOUR favourite Agatha Christie story?

Team Poirot or Team Marple?