A perusal of Agatha Christie novels reveals an important truth--
She truly didn't write all that many "murder during the local manor house weekend party" books.
Other mystery writers did--almost as if they were deliberately spoofing the form. Ngaoi Marsh, Georgette Heyer.
Agatha Christie: not so much.
Christie's books might best be described as "local community" murders: Murder is Announced, Murder at the Vicarage...
One of the few books that does explore the dissolution of a closed environment (or manor house) is Bertram's Hotel, and the point here is one that Christie returns to again and again, namely:
There is no such thing as a closed environment.
Bertram's, for one, is a deliberate facade. Other Christie mysteries present the problems of the supposed closed environment more organically. In The Body in the Library, complications result from an expanding community and neighborly resentment. In both Murder is Announced and Hercule Poirot's Christmas, the absence of generational and community knowledge is underscored. Are people who they claim to be? How would we know if they aren't?
When Christie wanted to keep a group in one place--and then knock them off one by one--she put them on an island (And Then There Were None).
As I state in an earlier post about the problems of utopia, isolation is artificial. Stuff always leaks in, leaks out. Christie understood this truth very well.
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