Not what you might think …

… John Lanchester — The Case of Agatha Christie — LRB 20 December 2018. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Christie produced a range of formal experiments so extensive that it’s quite difficult to think of an idea she didn’t try, short of setting a Poirot novel in a school for wizards. (Spoilers throughout all the next paragraphs. Though having said that, it’s a peculiar property of Christie’s work, speaking as someone who has reread several of the books multiple times, that you quite often forget, until you’re a significant way in, that you’ve read the book before; and even after that, you quite often forget whodunnit. Quite a few Christie fans have told me they’ve had the same experience. These are signs, perhaps, that the specifics of outcome are as unimportant to Christie’s readers as they were to her, and the main interest on both sides is formal and technical. You don’t mind rereading in the same way you don’t mind rereading a poem; you don’t care about re-encountering plot details just as you don’t care about re-encountering a rhyme.)