Sheppard is certainly there for us to identify with, to some degree. That said, the sidekick and the audience are not the same thing. But both were, like Poe’s purloined letter on its filigree card-rack, hidden in plain sight the whole time, even if our own ‘little grey cells’ do not have the wit to detect the deception. Up until the reveal, the murderer and the act of murder were not to be found within the pages, as such. The reader has in a sense been used as an unwitting ‘vessel’, concealing Sheppard’s true actions within the act of reading itself. Sheppard the sidekick is, in a sense, the reader’s representative and Christie uses that well-known formal trope as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the killer into the narrative undetected. The readers themselves in fact provide the more interesting context here. 296).Īlthough there are interesting things to say about them, the cultural context and geographical setting of the detective novel are incidental. By his own admission, he is not writing his journal (our narrative) to deceive but, rather, assuming himself to be the victor in the game, to chronicle a defining failure of Hercule Poirot (Christie, 2012, p. His guilt was there in the text for us to discover, theoretically, as the rules of ‘fair play’ require. Is Sheppard an unreliable narrator? While he is certainly not candid with us, does he actively lie to us at any point? Arguably at least, his dishonesty is based only on omission and not on concealment.
Poirot’s deliberate positioning of Sheppard as a substitute for his ‘Watson’ (Captain Hastings) is also a switch of a kind which allows the detective to ‘possess’ or keep him in a custody of sorts while he gathers evidence to confirm his theory. In Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’, Dupin’s famous switcheroo allows him to gain possession of the Queen’s letter unnoticed. What, then, are the consequences of the denouement in the more serious game of cat-and-mouse eventually won by Poirot? The audience/reader emerges once more as the key context for understanding the detective novel. 4 The Purloined Killer: the role of the reader
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