The science in Agatha Christie

Carla Valentine helps us admire Agatha Christie all the more.

Valentine is a pathologist — she even runs a dating site for people in her profession called Dead Meet — and the author of The Science of Murder: The Forensics of Agatha Christie (2021). She is also a longtime Christie fan.

She enjoys the mysteries themselves, just like the rest of us do, adding, "But when I first began reading her books as a child, it was the many clues she provided about dead bodies — the blood, wounds, and confusing  decomposition artifacts — that I found the most ingenious, and this cemented the love of forensic pathology that would go on to shape my whole life."

Christie learned much about blood and wounds when she worked as a nurse during both world wars. Mostly, however, she was just a good student who read medical journals, questioned experts and worked hard to stay on top of the latest developments in crime solving.

Valentine points out how her stories reflect her growing knowledge about such things as fingerprints and trace evidence and how these are used to solve crimes. In her early books, Christie didn't seem to know the difference between a revolver and an automatic handgun, yet she learned, just as she learned about poisons, autopsies, handwriting analysis, blood spatter and all the rest.

Speaking of blood spatter, Valentine points out the difference between blood spatter and blood splatter and also between blood that spouts and blood that spurts. Christie also knew these differences, and this is clear from her books.

There is actually more blood in Agatha Christie novels than we remember. We tend to associate her with poisonings, something she became an expert on. Yet shootings and stabbings also occur frequently. Valentine provides a Murder Methods Table in the appendix that shows at a glance how victims die in each of her books. In And Then There Were None, for example, there is a shooting, a poisoning, a blow to the head, a drowning, an ax murder, a hanging and a person who is crushed to death.

Christie closely followed true crime news and sometimes modeled her plots on these actual events. Other times her characters make reference to these crimes.

Valentine tells us a lot about the use of forensics in solving crimes, both the history and the science, yet she never strays far from Agatha Christie. Thus her book never fails to stay interesting.