Generally speaking, the extra murders that Christie throws into her books don't bother me. They are usually fairly unpleasant people anyway.
However, the killing of Ross in Lord Edgware Dies or Thirteen at Dinner has always struck me as particularly gratuitous.
It works. In fact, the entire novel is psychologically on-target. It plays off several Christie classics: assumptions about what people expect to see; the cunning of a supposedly stupid character; the role of vanity in a killer's make-up. In some ways, the book and its several films remind me of To Die For, in which romance takes a back seat to how each character seems to covet the limelight.
The killing of Ross--a friendly if wistful actor in the book; a friendly playwright in at least one of the films--is within the wilful and almost random personality of the killer. And I suppose it is to Christie's credit that she killed off her extras (rather than wounding them or putting them into comas).
I think my detectives could easily prevent the death by keeping their eye on the two main suspects. The book is sneaky because it trades on viewers' assumptions but the killer's identity is more or less a given. Like Cards on the Table, only so many people could be the murderers (Christie often expanded the pool of suspects with red herrings and a plethora of motives: everyone actually might be the murderer but only one story holds together entirely).
The above approach is the approach that Alleyn should have taken in Singing in the Shrouds: cover the men, not the women.
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