Stopping Christie Murderers: Crazy is Harder to Stop, Murder is Easy and Endless Night

These posts present fictional crime prevention detectives who go into novels, specifically Agatha Christie novels, to stop the murders there. 

*Spoilers* 

Not many but some of Christie's murderers are nuts, such as Miss Honoria Waynflete from Murder is Easy. And the problem with crazy is that craziness is difficult to stop. 

Take Michael from Endless Night. Although he goes crazy after the murder, he doesn't start out that way. Like most Christie murderers, he is self-protective. He doesn't plan to put himself at risk. The murder at the end is an aberration in an otherwise careful plan.

That is, Christie's murderers usually kill within a mindset and current set of experiences; they want various things out of their real lives that they will protect by not behaving stupidly. The things they want are often the things that make them vulnerable. And because they are vulnerable, they can be stopped. 

With the truly crazy, their craziness is their protection. While Michael's link to Greta immediately gives away his nefarious plan, Miss Waynflete's link to the dead parrot, by itself, wouldn't convince anyone of anything. Unfortunately, my crime prevention detectives would have to catch her in the act of trying to do someone in.

The point here is an important one: my recent personal contact with a suicide brought home to me how much the human spirit, evolutionary or emotionally or culturally or morally, isn't prepared for acts that violate social norms. And social norms do matter! (By themselves, they do an exceptional job keeping society functional.) Consequently, I've always thought it was unfair to blame police and other investigators for not imagining as a reality the unimaginable.

The point here is also the reason that I don't buy the "sane person who murders a dozen people to hide one murder" as occurs in The ABC Murders. I don't think truly non-serial-killing people do that. Something inherent holds us back from that one-on-one level of evil. And, in fact, Christie does a decent job with her serial murderer. He may actually be what he thinks he isn't. (I will come back to The ABC Murders in a later post.)  

To put the matter more cynically: people justify themselves, and they have to live with their justifications. And some acts simply are too difficult to justify unless one is nuts. Michael in Endless Night goes crazy because he can't leap the gap--not when he was likely falling in love, unintentionally, with the wife he killed.