Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938)

"I chose Hercule Poirot’s Christmas because it’s a very good example of the classic whodunnit with an impossible crime element woven in. It’s not the main aspect of the story. It doesn’t have to be the be-all and end-all of the novel. I’ve just written a novel myself where there is a locked room puzzle, but it’s not the central focus of the story. It’s a lot of fun, from my point of view, to write it, but you can do things with a novel that go beyond the locked room element. That’s what Christie does in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas . She has a very good plot with some good clueing and misdirection. It’s a good mystery in a country house setting, at Christmas. What more could you want but a murder? That murder involves an apparent impossibility. So this is a different kind of story from the others we’re talking about because the locked room is not the central focus of the story, but it does illustrate that it’s something that can be utilized in quite a wide variety of ways. I’ve actually written a whole book called The Life of Crime , a history of crime fiction, which explores that and other issues, such as the connections between different types of crime stories. I do think it’s interesting that you can find these hidden connections in different subgenres which people might not expect. So in Scandi noir, the Swedish writers Sjöwal and Wahlöö wrote a very good crime novel called The Locked Room as part of their Martin Beck series. The series has a political dimension, it’s about 1960s Scandinavia, so it’s very, very different from John Dickson Carr. It shows that the appeal of these entertaining puzzles is very wide. You can employ them in different ways and achieve different effects as a writer. Can this apparent miracle, with its potential rational solution, play a part in my story? That’s quite thought-provoking, the sheer range that throws up, and you see these ideas cropping up all over the place, which probably brings me to the next example."