I was watching Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery a while back and thinking: this is clever, but it’s not that clever. And that got me thinking about what “that clever” actually means, at least for me.

For a few years now, every night before sleep, I read a couple of chapters from an ebook. As I’m not at my sharpest at that time of day, I tend to read non-demanding books which I find for free on Standard Ebooks. ¹

A lot of the books I download are mystery/crime novels published in the early 1900s. Naturally, many of these are from Agatha Christie.

I think I’ve now read almost all of her work and there are three detective stories that stand out. Not just because they’re good, but because they feel like the end of the line: the three best possible answers to “who’s the murderer?”

1. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
2. Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
3. And Then There Were None (1939)

If you haven’t read them, you should. They’re short masterclasses in subverting expectations.

After these three, what else is there to do? How do you top this?

I’m not an expert on detective fiction; maybe someone has come up with something equally brilliant that I don’t know about. But from what I’ve read, these three feel definitive.

Here’s what makes these three novels brilliant:

• In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the murderer is the narrator. ²
• In Murder on the Orient Express, the murderer is every suspect. All of them.
• In And Then There Were None, the murderer is one of the victims.

Talk about plot twists… It feels like everything since has been a variation of these.