Like Sherlock Holmes, she suggests that the expression on the face of a corpse can reveal how the individual died, and their emotions at the time of death.
Occasionally, as a storyteller, she bent the rules. She was an avid reader of newspaper reports of criminal cases and engaged in active debate with other eminent crime writers, exchanging ideas and information at their meetings in the Detection Club, founded in 1930. And Poirot himself frequently disdained the practice – articulated by renowned French criminologist Edmond Locard as “‘every contact leaves a trace” – of searching for tiny pieces of evidence, preferring to lie back in an armchair with his eyes closed in order to see the solution with “the eyes of the mind”.Ĭhristie’s research and attention to detail makes her work believable, and she brought the latest in forensic science to public attention. In The Case of the Perfect Maid she sneakily collected a suspect’s fingerprints using only a pocket mirror and a piece of half-eaten seaside rock. While Hercule Poirot, a professional detective, displayed his expertise in fingerprints from the start, Miss Marple, an amateur, was given to improvisation.
Which is not to say that her characters slavishly always followed the rules.
In some areas, notably fingerprints, Christie’s novels, perhaps as a result of her conversations with experts, anticipated innovations before they were formally adopted. Valentine’s book also serves as an exploration of those techniques, including the collection of fingerprints, the interpretation of impressions like footprints or tyre tracks, the analysis of bloodstains and, at the autopsy stage, of the victims themselves.
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