In case you wondered …

… Why Agatha Christie Is Still the Queen of Crime | CrimeReads. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It is simply clever, this inversion of the cliché, but it is so much more than that. This twist of Agatha’s upon the femme fatale is also the truth: women like Arlena are not so much predators as prey. And so the twist slots the whole book into position. It solves the puzzle because it solves the character: that is why it is satisfying.

As Jule Styne said, “It's easy to be clever. But the really clever thing is to be simple.”