Why Didn't They Ask Evans? by: Agatha Christie

 

So, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?  It’s honestly a good title for a murder mystery and it’s the central mystery keeping all the puzzle pieces from coming together for Lady Frankie Derwent’s and Bobby Jones’s investigations into the death of a man who mysteriously fell off a cliff while Bobby was playing a game of golf.  His dying words are “Why didn’t they ask Evans?” and that’s only in the first chapter.  Agatha Christie is incredibly intelligent in how she structures the novel, as if this were a Poirot or Miss Marple story there probably would be much more investigation and the book would be at most half the length.  Since the main characters are two people who are not detectives when the denouement happens you see just where the characters ended up going wrong.  Luckily in going wrong they actually were going nearly right throughout so much of the novel but since they have no idea who Evans is, when they eventually solve it the final reveal becomes almost a punchline because it makes everything so very easy to solve.  Christie excels at executing this as a twist which is a very difficult twist to pull off, a lesser author would make it feel hollow.  It’s an eleventh hour twist as well after the murderer has revealed themselves, even gloating that the two hadn’t figured out who Evans was.

 

The first chapter of the novel is among Christie’s best.  Bobby Jones shares his name with a golfer of the time which Christie uses to juxtapose hat this Bobby Jones is more than a bit of a dope, stumbling upon a murder that he doesn’t know was a murder, and immediately trusting the first person who comes once the doctor he was with goes to get help.  It takes a while for the murder to be suspected to be a murder.  A lot of the rest of the novel keeps up the intrigue while laying out this odd humor.  Bobby and Frankie, while not dumb, have that naïve charm to them as they concoct several plans to get in the good graces of the people they are convinced must be responsible for this man’s death, accidentally coming upon a conspiracy that they really shouldn’t be wrapped up in.  Despite reading several novels by Christie before, I hadn’t really come across a book like this where there is a lot of humor baked into the text.  Some of it may be because these are two essentially upper class characters coming from an upper class perspective that’s very British.  It’s also the fact that these characters are somehow finding their way in and out of danger throughout, the humor deriving from the fact that the reader is going to be genre savvy enough to realize what the wrong decision in certain situations would be, making very logical decisions and deductions to give information to the grieving family of this man.  There’s also this sense of mistaken identity and disguises done by everyone that are played for both comedy and drama, the final third of the book turning into a very good thriller as the pieces begin to fall into place.

 

Overall, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? is a question that has a very simple answer that manages to be a final piece that explains the puzzle despite not needing to answer a mystery whose solution is explained, but once it’s revealed there’s just another layer to what makes this genuinely one of Christie’s best.  It’s genuinely a shame that this one is kind of overlooked, though I wonder why the American market retitled it The Boomerang Clue.  9/10.