The Man in the Brown Suit ad Crooked House
There are many tropes in the mystery genre. It is a common joke that the butler did it. But beyond jokes, there are many tropes that formed during the golden era of mystery for a good reason. The expert private detective is always contrasted with the bungling policeman, and there is always one suspect who lacks empathy but is not the killer, and a female suspect who complicates things by involving another suspect. Christie uses all of these very consistently, as she has recognized them as reliable generators of a robust plot. But the very most common trope in the cozy mystery genre is also the one that Christie is the most apprehensive to employ: the amateur detective. This is because, very often, the amateur detective is too skilled to be vivid or entirely incongruous to the situation at hand. The focus of this article is on two of Christie’s sparse amateur detective articles, with The Man in the Brown Suit and Crooked House demonstrating distinctly different yet equally effective methods of approaching the novice detective.
In Brown Suit, the main character was raised by an adventurous single parent, who just so happened to channel that adventure into Paleoanthropology, the study of ancient man. She is stifled by such an adventure that simultaneously encourages a journey, yet always ends up in a dusty symposium. Upon her father’s death, she sets out with the distinct impression that she shall find adventure in London. Unbeknownst to her, as set out in the prologue, the most successful international crime ring in history is having a civil war. Upon her arrival in London, she is caught in the crossfire as a result of her hunger for adventure. Two members of the syndicate are murdered, and on account of the incident, she is given a massive head-start on the police, leading her to board a ship departing for South Africa. This is the first major principle that is consistent between The Man in the Brown Suit and Crooked House: the mystery takes place in an environment as foreign to the main character as the act of sleuthing. Returning to South Africa, she quickly falls in love with the main suspect, the nominal brown suited man. That love gives her immense courage. She manages to surprise the professional villains by breaking the limitations they assume of human nature. The sheer irrationality of her emotional approach is unpredictable, and thus, she manages an impossible happy ending.
In Crooked House, the main character is also motivated by love, but not one so strange and instant as that of Brown Suit. The main character was also conditioned for mystery, albeit in a different way, by growing up with an assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard for a father. That is where the similarities end. Crooked House is not globetrotting, with only the first chapter in Egypt and the rest all in England. There are far more characters in Crooked House. The entire house is full of queer folk, which has spawned the idea of leaning. That crookedness is also the primary factor obscuring the murderer from the reader, as everyone feels off. This mirrors Cards on the Table is that, instead of the detective having to discern who is the crooked one out of a group of honest people, the detective is trying to discern who was crooked in just the right way to do the deed. The intense familial ties of all the characters also serve to make the mystery more adhesive to the main character. Crooked House has a fake ending; however, it is one many, many pages before the end of the book, so the reader is immediately aware that something is off, something is… crooked. The ending is similar to the Orient Express in that it is “So Obvious” on the re-read. I solved it on the first run-through, but it was more difficult than Five Little Pigs, meaning its difficulty is of a rewarding quality, far more difficult than that of the Orient Express.
The Chase Verdict is that Crooked House has a higher average writing quality and a more complex ending than The Man in the Brown Suit, but both have memorable villains who stretch our understanding of evil in different ways, and less memorable heroes who stand out as a bright light in the sea of a tired trope.