Generally speaking, the extra murders that Christie throws into her books don't bother me. The victims 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 uses several classic Christie tropes: assumptions about what people expect to see; a supposedly stupid character who turns out to be quite cunning; 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 covets 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 believable based on the wilful, 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 eyes 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 murderer (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 of keeping one's eye on the most likely bad guy is the approach that Alleyn should have taken in Singing in the Shrouds, one of those novels where Marsh traded intelligent, boring, bureaucratic "lock them all up until we check alibis" procedure for a splashy, melodramatic ending.
She was a playwright!
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