Post by Salzmank on Sept 14, 2021 19:50:01 GMT
It's rather remarkable that Death has managed to pull off such major cast shifts over ten years, including replacing the central character with some regularity, without compromising the character of the show itself. I have to conclude the key to it is strict adherence to a familiar and comfortable formula, regardless of the specific dramatis personae: the eccentric, fish-out-of-water DI, whose deductive processes are often inscrutable to his team; their alternating attitudes of patient solicitude to puzzlement to eye-rolling exasperation; the final-act gathering of suspects for the review-and-reveal. All very comfy indeed. O maven of mystery and honcho of homicide: did that last device originate with Christie, or go back to Conan Doyle...or some other author of whom I may never even have heard?
Christie certainly did gather-up-all-the-suspects dénouements, notably and memorably in Murder on the Orient Express, but less frequently than the movie and TV adaptations may make it seem. Book-Death on the Nile’s climax is a small-scale affair that, if I’m remembering correctly, doesn’t even include the murderer until the end. As silly as the Poirot-accuses-everyone-before-revealing-true-killer gambit may seem, I have an immense fondness for it, especially as I first discovered Christie through the Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov films.
I don’t think Doyle ever did anything like that… He rarely did murder mysteries, in fact. (Sherlock Holmes stories most often feature bizarre, even surrealistic events—say, getting a writing job based on hair color—that Holmes explains by linking them to criminal but non-murderous activities.)
It’s funny, I can think of quite a few early mysteries in which the detective sums up the crime at length, but I can’t think of any early ones in which the detective rounds up all the suspects in a room. Carolyn Wells (a justly forgotten writer who did her [relatively] best-known work in 1910s) wrote some with that kind of summation, but (1) I haven’t read her books much at all and (2) I’m sure some other writers used that kind of ending before her. If I find out anything more I’ll let you know.