The Most and Least Satisfying Endings of All of Agatha Christie’s Mysteries

I’ve talked about the ending of The Hollow before here on Book Riot, but that’s because it’s so damn good. I literally screamed out loud the first time I read the story. An Hercule Poirot mystery, The Hollow sees everyone’s favourite moustachioed Belgian detective spending some time in the countryside, when he, as usual, gets caught up in a murder. The philandering Dr John Christow is found dying of a gunshot wound by the swimming pool of a country house, and his wife, Gerda, is standing over him holding a gun. The Hollow proves that Christie is not only the Queen of Crime, but the Marquess of Misdirection, as, despite the setup of the murder scene, it’s a huge shock when you reach the final pages and find out that Gerda was indeed the murderer all along.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the book that made Agatha Christie’s name for a reason, and has been held in high acclaim ever since its first publication; in 2013, the Crime Writers’ Association voted it the greatest crime novel of all time. While the revelation isn’t quite as famous as that of Murder on the Orient Express, it’s fairly well-known — the twist ending, shocking at the time and to many readers since, reveals that the book’s narrator, Dr James Sheppard, is himself the murderer. The clues are dropped expertly throughout the story, but unless the reader’s little grey cells are working as hard as Poirot’s, they won’t guess until the last moments of the book.

Mystery writer and Christie contemporary Ronald Knox famously wrote in his Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction: “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them”. In A Murder is Announced, Christie both sticks to and subverts this rule; the twist hinges around one of the central characters, an elderly woman named Letitia, and her deceased identical twin, Charlotte. At first, the murder seems to be a prank gone wrong, but as the story unfolds, we realise that it was in fact Letitia who died before the story even began, and that Charlotte has been impersonating her — and planned the murder to remove a loyal but increasingly forgetful old friend who was the only person who knew the truth.

I doubt I need to tell anyone reading the way that Murder on the Orient Express ends — it’s one of the most famous twists in literature. Even though most readers opening the book for the first time will know that all of the suspects are guilty, Murder on the Orient Express is a great read because of the catharsis the reader gets when the full story is revealed. While many of Christie’s murder victims are quite horrible people, Samuel Ratchett is one of the worst. While he is now a successful businessman, he was previously a vicious gangster who kidnapped and murdered a 3-year-old child, destroying her entire family in the process. Poirot’s eventual decision to fabricate a story and let the self-appointed jury of murderers go free is an incredibly satisfying ending to an expertly plotted story.

This short story and play has been adapted a number of times, most recently in 2016 in a miniseries starring Toby Jones and Kim Cattrall, but it’s still one of Christie’s lesser-known tales, potentially because it doesn’t feature Poirot or Marple, or even Tommy and Tuppence. A standalone story, it’s a punchy psychological tale that explores the emotionally manipulative world of the adversarial courtroom. A young man, Leonard Vole, is accused of killing a rich older woman, Emily French, who has taken a shine to Leonard and made him her heir. Vole’s wife, Romaine, testifies in the trial — but does so on the side of the prosecution, giving damning evidence against Leonard. Leonard’s solicitor picks holes in her statement, revealing her to be a liar, and Leonard is acquitted; which is, we learn at the end, exactly what the couple planned. Romaine and Leonard set up her role as a witness for the prosecution because they believed that an angry wife, later proven to be lying about crucial details of the case, would be more convincing to the jury than a wife who stood by her murderous husband.