Although the 1920s and 1930s are remembered as a golden age for mysteries, that era's exemplar, Agatha Christie, and most of her contemporaries had no gift for taking readers on a journey into another culture or milieu. The fun lay chiefly in guessing, if one cared, who killed Roger Ackroyd. Nowadays, Christie's kind of puzzle, based on clues larded into the text, has largely given way to a more novelistic brand of mystery, in which the solution may not matter that much to either the writer or the reader. The motive for a crime is more likely to be psychological than...
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