A Tale of Two Christies

In the past couple of weeks I've read two Agatha Christie books featuring Poirot: The ABC Murders and The Murder of Roger Ackeroyd.

It was an interesting comparison as I didn't have any advanced knowledge of the plot for ABC, but I knew what the 'trick' to Ackeroyd was before reading it.

I've always maintained that I don't care about spoilers - I get great pleasure out of seeing how things are done, so my enjoyment is not diminished by knowing the twists ahead of time.

This was more or less a chance to prove that theory: two books in the same series by the same author, one which was a complete surprise and the other with "spoilers".

Hard to say what my conclusions are. On the one hand, I did spend a large amount of ABC second guessing my assumptions, which was fun. I didn't pick the killer until a few pages before the reveal - I had actually formulated a completely different "clever-pants" twist, that seemed perfectly reasonable until the last couple of chapters.

On the other hand, Ackeroyd had always been on my list of things to read precisely because I knew what the twist was, and I wanted to see how Christie pulled it off. I was very impressed. Knowing what the twist was, I accurately picked the point were the "tell" occurred, but spent the rest of the book wondering if I had been misinformed. Christie did such a brilliant job with her treatment of the characters that I started second guessing my conclusions even when I knew they were correct. I kept watching to see when Poirot would figure it out, and if he would give us some indication. It really felt like he had made the wrong call regarding the killer and, when everything came together in the end, I still managed to feel somehow surprised.

So I can honestly say I did enjoy the book I read "with spoilers" more than the book I read without them, but then it was also the better book of the two. And I did enjoy the book I read "without spoilers", for completely different reasons.

As experiments go, it didn't really give me any viable data. I did get a couple of good reads out of it, though, so I guess there was no time wasted.

Oh, and you should read The Murder of Roger Ackeroyd. You can skip the other book without really losing anything from your complete reading experience, but Ackeroyd is a must.