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Magazine
Slice of Life
Did the butler do it?
V. GANGADHAR
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Surprise endings are the very stuff of thrillers.
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Recently, one of our leading columnists, whom I greatly admire, shocked me by revealing the name of the killer while discussing the Agatha Christie classic Murder of Roger Ackroyd. To rub it in further, he also revealed who the bad
guy was in her famous play, “The Mousetrap”.
The columnist explained that he did not like “improbable twists” in a crime novel just for the sake of shock value and added that critics were shocked when Christie made a particular character, whom we would not have suspected, the murderer in Ackroyd. But to millions of fans, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the best-ever Christie thriller. And, despite its “illogical” ending, “The Mousetrap” turned out to be the longest-ever running play.
Surpise for its own sake
Improbable endings are not to be confused with illogical endings where surprise is created for the sake of surprise. In Ackroyd, Hercule Poirot explains, step by step, how the killer planned and executed the murder and we are completely satisfied. He had the motive and he had the opportunity. I would have faulted Christie if the explanation was not satisfactory and defied logic. In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas readers may have been initially shocked at the identity of the murderer, but then, throughout the plot, the clues are scattered around. Hercule Poirot used his “little grey cells” to solve the crime, we could not. There is nothing illogical here. Both in real life and fictitious crime, everyone at the scene of the crime remains a suspect till the actual culprit is nabbed.
Some readers feel that another Christie thriller, And Then There Were None, is too bizarre. Ten people are invited to a lonely island by a mysterious host, Mr. U.N. Owen. All of them hold guilty secrets and once trapped in the island, they are doomed to die one after the other. But then, if all of them die, who is the murderer, because no one leaves the island. The novel, which sent shivers up my spine when I first read it in school, did have a surprise ending but I would not call it illogical.
I agree with the columnist’s point of view on how movies distort mystery novels to achieve surprise or shock endings. This happens all the time and that is why we generally accept that the book is always better than the movie. A fan of John Grisham, I regard his first novel, The Firm, dealing with the happenings in a Mafia-owned law firm, as his best. But I was shocked when I watched the film version, starring Tom Cruise. I could barely recognise the original plot.
The columnist also pointed out how the American TV serial “Dallas” was effectively killed when its producers twisted the plot to absurd lengths, killing off characters and then making them stage a comeback. These twists and turns are now common in Indian soaps. In one serial, “Kasauti Zindagi kay”, characters routinely killed off in car accidents and shootings proved indestructible. After a few episodes, they reappear and continue merrily. And the serial retained its prime time slot. In another American serial, as public interest waned, the producers turned the clock back and presented it again, as if certain events had not happened. But this could not save the show. Ekta Kapoor had a different strategy; she took the plot of “Kasauti” and some other serials 20 years forward. But the characters remained as youthful as ever and the absurdity was lost on the Indian viewers.
Moviemakers and TV serial producers are not the only ones to introduce illogical twists in plots. Authors, some of them quite famous, are also guilty occasionally. Ellery Queen, the American detective writer, wrote excellent murder mysteries but slipped up badly in The Egyptian Cross Mystery. Instead of solving the crime using logic and commonsense, Ellery Queen brought in all kinds of Egyptian mythology and mumbo-jumbo and took us all on a wild goose chase before realising that he had been fooled. It was then back to commonsense and logic, and the crime was solved. (No, I won’t reveal the identity of the killer.) This book is not a patch on another EQ thriller, The Dutch Shoe Mystery, where two murders in a city hospital are solved by the detective using common sense and logic.
Keeping it simple
Every lover of mystery novels would agree that the more complicated a murder mystery became, the less readable it was. Simple plots, as close to life as possible, are the best. Four people with a past, playing Bridge are the suspects in Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table, where the victim (their host) was someone who was threatening to expose them. A brilliant process of elimination by Hercule Poirot leads him to the murderer. I am also against revealing the identity of the murderer or the villain just because the book is pretty old though it might have been filmed recently. Can we tell everyone that a particularly likeable character is actually the traitor in the recent James Bond film “Casino Royale” because the book was published 50 years ago and everyone knew the secret? No, we should not.
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