Agatha Christie: Murder Is Easy (first published in 1939)
Carla Valentine: Murder Isn’t Easy (Sphere 2021)
‘It’s very easy to kill – so long as no one suspects you.’
This is what Miss Pinkerton, the lovely old lady, says to the surprised Luke Fitzwilliam on the train, when she is about to report a serial murder at Scotland Yard. The man did not think it is important until he saw the lady’s obituary in the next day’s newspaper. The old lady did not make it to Scotland Yard, she was killed in a car accident. The story won’t let the man rest, so he sets out to find the murderer himself.
The novel was first published in 1939 and, like many of her other books, exemplifies Agatha Christie’s extensive knowledge in the field of forensic science. Carla Valentine fell in love with the author’s works as a child, and this ultimately led her to study biology, work as a pathologist’s assistant, and then write books about it. In Murder Isn’t Easy, she lists the techniques used during investigations and the groups of clues used to solve mysteries. The book presents the history of different fields of forensic science through true crimes, so for the fainthearted I don’t recommend reading it.
Agatha Christie has always been described by her acquaintances as an observer, a person who listened more than she talked. She always strived for perfection in everything, therefore she had accurate legal, medical and criminological knowledge and followed all new scientific results. Even before its introduction to the police, she equipped Poirot with a crime scene kit, used the term serial killer for the first time, and once corrected a lawyer whose knowledge of inheritance law was outdated. She was often inspired by true crimes, while the popular board game Cluedo was inspired by the unsolvable puzzle of Then There Were None. Her goal was always to provide the reader with some sort of comfort and catharsis, because, as she wrote in Ordeal by Innocence, the innocents were important, not the guilty ones.
