How Does Agatha Christie Build Suspense

People tend to like a good mystery, and authors know that. That’s why they have an abundance of tricks up their sleeves used to fool and engage their readers. Mystery writers are able to catch the attention of their audience by using literary elements introduced by pioneers of the genre like Agatha Christie. Christie is known as one of the first authors to publish popular mystery stories and establish techniques that have evolved into today’s modern mysteries. She used these techniques to hook readers and create suspense in her novels. One of her most famous works, And Then There Were None, provides great examples of this. Agatha Christie uses foreshadowing, deception, and references the nursery rhyme “Ten Little Indians” to build the element

Authors like Agatha Christie make it a priority to get to know their audiences because in thrilling novels it is important to know how much or how little your readers like to be deceived and given clues. “Most readers of mystery fiction do enjoy being fooled, and are, generally speaking, literate enough to appreciate the verbal sleight of hand essential to the genre..." (Scott-Kilvert 125-126). With this in mind, Christie decided to write And Then There Were None in a way that throws the reader off of the track to find the killer. A method she used to achieve this was to give hints about suspected killers, but not actually the true killer. For example, on page 123 of And Then There Were None, Dr. Armstrong says, “‘Many homicidal lunatics are very quiet unassuming people. Delightful fellows’” (Christie 123). This quote shows that Armstrong has a positive outlook on murderous people and makes it seem as though he is more likely to be one. Readers may interpret that as a clue to if Dr. Armstrong is the killer or not, which he isn’t, making it a deceptive quote. Christie uses false clues like this many times throughout the novel to build