Detectives have to be fundamentally infallible. On their journey to a mystery solution, they

can be fragile or flawed or unreliable or uncertain. But the reader has to be able to rely

on the sleuth to find a satisfactory answer in the end. It's a fundamental part of what

makes it who done it work. After all, who's going to keep reading a type of story where the hero

shrugs their shoulders on the final page and says, I don't know, maybe they did it with mirrors?

Over time, pulling that rabbit out of the hat in a plausible yet surprising way becomes more

and more difficult for a writer. Wearing of their creation, most detective novelists either move

on to a different character or drift away from the genre altogether. Writers like Nioh

Marsh and Michael Innis, who stuck with the same sleuth for five decades a piece, are definitely

in the minority here. For the rest, a tricky question then arises. How best to conclude the career

of a beloved detective? With the bang of a triumphant final case? Or just a whimper as they are never

heard from again? Agatha Christie, the best known and most widely read of all the authors to come

out of Detective Fiction's golden age, grappled with this issue in perhaps the most unexpected way of all.

Join me, then, as we delve into the surprising story of her sleuths swansong.

Welcome to She Done It. I'm Caroline Crampton.

Today's episode merits a rare overall spoiler warning from me. I generally try to keep my

episodes free of major plot revelations, as I'm aware that some listeners use the show as a way

to discover new mysteries to read. However, it's not possible to do this particular topic justice

without discussion of what happens in Sleeping Murder and Curtain by Agatha Christie.

So if you want to read either of those books for the first time without prior knowledge of how

they end, I recommend choosing a different episode of She Done It to Listen To For Now and returning

to this one once you've finished them. By the time the second world war began in 1939,

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