Mrs. Christie is known to all connoisseurs of detective stories as beyond comparison the finest practitioner of this delightful craft. She should long ago have received the Order of Merit, as having given more and richer pleasure to the English-speaking race than all other living persons, except perhaps Mr. [Charlie] Chaplin, Mr. [George Bernard] Shaw and Mr. [P. G.] Wodehouse. It is marvellous that anyone should invent a new method of putting experienced readers off the scent, but almost beyond belief that this should be done repeatedly by one writer: in The Man in the Brown Suit, Peril at End House, Lord Edgware Dies. Death on the Orient Express, as in no other stories, she has invented an entirely new device, and the new device has been different each time. The point of course is that, readers being so sophisticated and alert, it is not enough to (deceptively...