Category Archives: Agatha Christie

Are You Ready for AI Agatha?

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by Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

Following up on Jim Bell’s discussion of Agatha Christie from Sunday…

The headline in the May 16, 2025 Saturday Evening Post read:

AI AGATHA CHRISTIE WILL TEACH YOU HOW TO WRITE! 

I can’t express my initial reaction because this is a G-rated blog. Suffice it to say, I was gobsmacked, horrified, and disappointed. Taking advantage of the deceased by commercializing and monetizing their image seems disrespectful when the person is no longer around to object. But that’s just me.

The idea of bringing dead people back to life using AI is also creepy but weirdly fascinating. Some music videos of contemporary, living singers performing duets with dead legends have been done quite well.

My fave is the 1989 video of “There’s a Tear in My Beer” with Hank Williams, Jr. playing alongside Hank Sr. who died when his son was only three. That gave this performance special poignance, imagining what might have been if Senior hadn’t died at age 29.

But AI has come a long way since 1989, with deepfakes and phony impersonations. Nothing is sacred anymore. And people will go to any outrageous lengths to make a buck.

The Agatha headline conjured up a TikTok-style, faux-historical bastardization of her image, dancing as she typed on her antique manual typewriter in time to “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

To my surprise, the video excerpt wasn’t awful and was quite interesting. Dame Agatha’s great-grandson and the Christie estate kept a firm grip on the production, ensuring a tasteful, authentic representation of her. The script used her own words from her writings about her storytelling techniques. No one put words in her–uh, its–mouth. Instead of reading her advice in books, writers can listen to the resurrected author speaking.

The video lasts about 10 minutes but only a few seconds show AI Agatha in action. The majority of the time is spent describing the process that the producers, directors, lighting techs, hairdressers, costumers, and others went through to give an accurate depiction. A human actress combined with AI resulted in an animated life-like Agatha.

Here’s the video:

The AI Agatha course is sold via the BBC Maestro program. It can be purchased by single episode or subscription. The description is at this link.

I’m interested to hear what TKZers think of this revolutionary concept. Please share your opinions in the comments.

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Join Debbie Burke on The Villain’s Journey – How to Create Villains Readers Love to Hate. Follow the steps to the darkest depths of the soul…if you dare!

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The Art of Misdirection

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“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” — Soren Kierkegaard

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One of the most interesting aspects of mystery novels for me is the author’s ability to construct a story that leads the reader “down the garden path.” Then when the truth is revealed, the reader smacks him/herself on the side of the head in recognition that they picked the wrong person as the villain. They should have seen it coming.

When I told a friend of mine about my interest in constructing novels that use this technique of misdirection, she was astonished. “It sounds like you’re deliberately manipulating what the reader is thinking.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s the point. If the author can present information to the reader so they react to the scenes in the story in a predictable way, it will produce an entertaining and satisfying experience for the reader.”

My friend said she didn’t like the idea of being fooled, but I think she’s fooling herself.

At its heart, a mystery novel is a game, a challenge to the reader to see if they can put the puzzle together correctly. The reader has all the necessary information, but the author uses several devices to misguide the reader into putting their trust in the wrong characters or the wrong clues.

Foreshadowing, Clues, and Red Herrings

In his article in Writer’s Digest,  Robert McCaw put it well:

“Misdirection also requires subtlety. The reader will feel crassly manipulated if the surprise ending arrives without sufficient hints or foreshadowing. Ideally, good misdirection makes the reader look back at various telltale clues peppered throughout the story, hopefully leading them to admire the author’s skill in setting up and obscuring the ultimate surprise.”

Perhaps the cleverest red herring of all time was created by Agatha Christie in her novel And Then There Were None, in which ten people on a remote island are being killed off one by one in a way that mirrors the nursery rhyme Ten Soldier Boys. When they get down to three people left alive, one of them (Vera) says

“You’ve forgotten the nursery rhyme. Don’t you see there’s a clue there?” She recited in a meaning voice: “Four little Indian boys going out to sea; A red herring swallowed one and then there were three.” She went on: “A red herring—that’s the vital clue. Armstrong’s not dead… He took away the china Indian to make you think he was. You may say what you like—Armstrong’s on the island still. His disappearance is just a red herring across the track…”

A clue that references the very words “red herring” is clever. But it turns out the clue itself was a red herring. Now that was really clever.

The Unreliable Narrator

In a novelsuspects.com article, Emily Watson writes

The term “unreliable narrator” was introduced in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction. Typically, for a narrator to be unreliable, the story needs to be presented by a first-person narrator. And since first-person accounts of stories and events are often flawed and biased, you could argue that all first-person narrators are by nature unreliable. But Booth explains that for a narrator to be unreliable, they must either misreport, misinterpret, misevaluate, underreport, under-interpret, or under-evaluate.

Once again Agatha Christie claims preeminence in misdirection with the unreliable narrator Dr. Sheppard in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

The False Ending

Robert McCaw also addressed the topic of false endings in his article in Writer’s Digest.

“Another of my favorite techniques is the false or penultimate ending. In this case, the narrative comes to a neat close. The protagonist solves the mysteries and identifies the culprit. There are no loose strings. The story is over, except it’s not. Instead, another chapter surprises the reader with a new and different take on the ending, often creating the opportunity to begin a new story, perhaps in another book.”

An example of this is the French film He Loves Me… He Loves Me Not directed by Laetitia Colombani. While not exactly a mystery, the movie’s unusual structure is a good example of misdirection, unreliable narration, and a false ending.

The movie was released in 2002 and starred Audrey Tautou, the actress who had previously been best known for her performance as the main character in the movie Amelie. Casting Tautou as Angelique in He Loves Me was a brilliant way to manipulate the viewers into immediately trusting the adorable girl.

In this movie, Angelique is an accomplished young artist in love with a married man, Dr. Loic Le Garrec (Samuel Le Bihan). The movie begins in a flower shop where Angelique is sending a pink rose to Le Garrec on his birthday, and it tracks the plot through scenes where Angelique appears to get closer and closer to her goal of breaking up Le Garrec’s marriage so the two of them can go off together.

Then something goes awry. Angelique realizes her plan has failed, and she decides to commit suicide. It seems this will be the sad end to a young woman’s life, but that’s the false ending. The movie is only at the halfway point.

As Angelique lies down on the floor in front of a gas stove, everything changes. It looks like the movie is rewinding in Fast Backward mode, and suddenly we’re all the way back to the beginning at the flower shop.

But this time, the movie presents the actual events, not just Angelique’s fantasy, and the viewer comes to understand Angelique was suffering from a mental illness called “erotomania.” The first half of the movie showed only a partial truth, but one that convinced the viewer of a lie.

In the actual ending, Angelique has survived her suicide attempt and is incarcerated in a mental institution. The final end of the movie is yet another false ending that I won’t spoil for you.

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So, there you have it. Red herrings, unreliable narrators, and false endings. All devices to trick the reader into enjoying a wonderful story.

“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

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So TKZers: There are many ways to lead the reader astray. Have you been fooled by misdirection? Have you used misdirection in your books? What books or movies would you recommend that gleefully mislead the audience?

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Was it a clue to murder? Or just a small child’s fanciful note? Private pilot Cassie Deakin must find her way through the labyrinth to solve the puzzle.

Available at  Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, or Apple Books.

Investigating Agatha Christie

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I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest. –Agatha Christie

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Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Her sales are exceeded only by the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.  According to her website at agathachristie.com, “She is best known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, as well as the world’s longest-running play – The Mousetrap. “

Agatha Christie’s books have sold over two billion copies worldwide!

Given Ms. Christie’s extraordinary success, it might be a good idea to see if we can discover some of her secrets.

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A few years ago, I watched a documentary entitled “The Agatha Christie Code” (available on Youtube)  in which researchers examined various aspects of Christie’s writing. These researchers included

Dr. Richard Forsyth, Research Fellow in Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick

Dr. Pernilla Danielsson, Academic Champion of Communications at the University of Birmingham

Dr. Marcus Dahl, Research Fellow at the School of Advanced Study – London University

They used computer technology to analyze Christie’s work, and they found interesting patterns in her stories that may give us a clue as to why she’s so popular.

Word Choices

Christie used simple language in her books, so readers were free to focus on the plot rather than the language. For example, the researchers found she used “said” often in an attribution rather than other words like “responded” or “answered.”

Christie also often repeated words within a short section of prose – something I’ve been warned against. Here’s an example from the novel Sad Cypress that was used in the video. (My notations in red.)

The researchers thought the repetition cemented the information in the reader’s mind. My editor would probably faint if I sent something like that to her, but maybe we should rethink the multiple uses of a word in a short section of prose.

Verbal Structure

The most interesting part of the video for me was when one of the researchers evaluated Christie’s works on the three criteria of

  •             Word length
  •             Word frequency
  •             Sentence structure

Dr. Danielsson plotted information about these aspects on a three-dimensional graph and plotted the same criteria from Arthur Conan Doyle’s works on the same graph. Christie’s books exhibited a consistency shown visually by her plotted points being clustered together while the points of Doyle’s stories were spread farther apart indicating his works were more dissimilar when compared to each other. This indicated that Doyle’s style had changed through the years while Christie’s had remained remarkably consistent.

Plot

Christie’s mysteries almost always create a world where

  •             There is a dead body
  •             A closed group of suspects are introduced
  •             A detective (either professional or amateur) is a character
  •             Red herrings are spread throughout
  •             There is a denouement scene where the detective identifies the murderer and brings closure to the story.

Some critics claim Christie wrote the same story over and over, but that’s not fair. For example, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, and And Then There Were None introduced novel twists to the standard murder mystery although they used a typical Christie template.

However, this general structure reassures the reader that there will be a logical puzzle that will be solved in the end, and that contributes to the sense of satisfaction.

Characters

While some famous characters appear in multiple books and are popular with the reading public (e.g., Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Captain Hastings), the number of characters in each novel may be just as important. This prompted an interesting theory by David Shephard, Master trainer in Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Mr. Shephard pointed out that people have a limited focus and a conscious mind can only concentrate on five to nine things at a time. When presented with more information than that, a person will enter a sort of hypnotic trance.

Since Christie’s stories often have more than nine characters and several plot lines, Shephard thinks the reader’s mind can’t handle the overload of information, so he/she begins to “feel” the book rather than just think about it. This emotional connection makes readers want to return to Agatha Christie’s books again and again.

I’m not sure I can buy that explanation, but it’s very interesting and makes me think I should count the characters in my future books to see if I can put my readers into a trance.

Content & Style

As we all know, Agatha Christie’s mysteries contain no explicit sexual scenes and no explicit violence. So why do so many readers still buy her novels? Readers of Christie’s books know there will be a logical solution to the murder, the killer will be caught, and the clues are all available to solve the mystery.

David Suchet, who played the part of Hercule Poirot in the television series Agatha Christie’s Poirot, compared Christie’s books to sudoku puzzles. He believes readers enjoy the books because they’re completely absorbed in figuring out the solution to the puzzle.

Length

Although I found a site with the number of pages in each of Agatha Christie’s novels, I only found a reference to the word count on https://thewritepractice.com/word-count/. That site had an article that states Agatha Christie’s mystery novels average between 40,000 and 60,000 words. That’s a little short for most novels today, but it could explain why people found them easy to read.

 

Pacing

Agatha Christie controlled the speed at which her books were read by laying out more descriptive passages at the beginning, but picking up the pace of the story as it progressed. Hypnotist Paul McKenna had an interesting take on this. He felt her particular pattern of writing caused certain brain chemicals to be released, resulting in a sort of addiction in the readers. This theory goes a little beyond my pay grade, but I do think picking up the pace is a technique that works well in mystery writing.

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So there you have it. While I’m sure there are other reasons for her success, these aspects of Agatha Christie’s writing are worth considering.

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So TKZers: Have you read many of Agatha Christie’s books? Why do you think they’re so popular? Have you viewed “The Agatha Christie Code” video?  Is there anything you think we can glean from the data in this post that will help with our own writing?

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“Very few of us are what we seem.” –Agatha Christie

Private pilot Cassie Deakin lands in the middle of a mystery and discovers things are not always what they seem.

Buy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, or Apple Books.