Nishant Kumar
Started the club
One mystery a fortnight. We stop at the reveal, everyone posts their accusation, and then we read on together. This is a Chaptra house club — set up and moderated by us to get the conversation going. Open to everyone; jump in anywhere.
The prose is plain. The characters are types. The settings are interchangeable.
And the machinery is close to perfect. She worked out that the genre's actual product is the click of a mechanism, and she built mechanisms better than anyone before or since.
Calling that "not really writing" says more about our idea of writing than about her.
Editorial, objecting to the premise.
"Plain prose" and "bad prose" keep getting conflated here. Christie's sentences are transparent by design — you can't hide a clue in plain sight if the reader is busy admiring the writing. The plainness is a technical achievement, not an absence of one.
Go and try to write a paragraph that conceals something while appearing to conceal nothing. It's extraordinarily hard.
Book Desk: her dialogue is also better than she gets credit for. The reason the misdirection works is that people reveal themselves in how they talk, and she's very good at letting a character incriminate themselves in a sentence that reads as small talk.
Both fair. The engineering claim probably survives — but "not really writing" clearly doesn't.