47. Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie (Mystery) 320 p.
When I decided yesterday to get started on the Anything Agatha Challenge, I didn’t really intend to finish all 10 books at once, but it looks like that’s what’s going to happen! That’s okay, though—I’m having a wonderful time rediscovering my love for Agatha Christie, and reading all these novels that are completely new to me. Where have all these great books been hiding all these years, while I’ve been thinking I’d long ago read just about every Christie novel there was?
Ordeal by Innocence is, along with Crooked House, one of Christie’s two favourites among her own novels. I can see why. The solution to the mystery depends even more than usual on the personalities of the people involved, rather than alibis and physical evidence. I have to admit that this is my favourite kind of mystery—I love Dorothy L. Sayers’s books, but I find the investigations in them a little dry and tedious, relying as they do on technical details and timetables.
This book isn’t just a mystery novel, though. Christie sets out to explore the consequences of a murder investigation, not on the guilty, but on the innocent. It’s a theme she uses at other times, particularly in the short story The Four Suspects (from The Thirteen Problems or The Tuesday Club Murders), but she never makes it as prominent as it is in this story.
Dr. Arthur Calgary, a scientist and polar explorer, returns to England after two years to find that he possesses information vital to an old murder trial—he can actually provide an alibi for a young man who has been convicted of murder. Open inquiry, however, it turns out that Jacko Argyle has already died of pneumonia in prison. Feeling guilty, although he is not actually to blame, he visits the family to deliver news that Jacko, who was convicted of killing his mother, Mrs. Argyle, is actually innocent and will be posthumously pardoned.
Calgary isn’t quite sure what reaction he expects, but some combination of resentment and relief seem appropriate—but that’s not the reaction he gets. Far from resenting him for having, however inadvertently, contributed to Jacko’s death, the family would rather he had left well alone and not raked up the old tragedy—because if Jacko didn’t do it, some other member of the family is a murderer. After two years, there doesn’t seem to be much chance of being able to prove the killer’s identity beyond a shadow of a doubt—which means the whole family may be under suspicion for the rest of their lives.
Ordeal by Innocence is a deft study of the psychology of suspicion, charity, love, and family relations. Yet another fantastic “new” Christie that I can credit to this challenge!
Pages read: 13,115
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge
