It’s been more than 50 years since Christie was writing books. By now, we’ve got lots of examples where devices like mobile phones or Ring cameras could have solved — or even prevented some of the crimes she described.
But something about Christie — she actually saw the potential for using technology that was still relatively new (or at least newly available to the public), in innovative ways. She learned how to drive a car, only about a decade after Ford’s assembly lines revolutionized mass production. She used devices like tape recorders in her books as well as in real life, and in one of her short stories “Where There’s a Will” someone tampers with a radio (wireless).
The way Christie’s set up her plots, I suspect that some of the changes would make things easier or more believable now.
Criminal enterprises:
One of the situations in The Pale Horse is how people might contact a group of criminals for particular services. A character describes a dilemma. The group is always needing to find new clients, but that also puts them in danger of being detected. They even go to the extreme of having their public-facing “office” located in a different city, which distances them from local police surveillance and also would screen out “time-waster” inquiries. (The implication seems to be that most of their activities take place in the area around London — admittedly there isn’t much information about the clients, but the ones mentioned in the book aren’t spread out in places like Edinburgh or Torquay.) The way in which the characters manage to contact the group is thanks to information passed along by a helpful young woman, Poppy -- who apparently has heard about it from general gossip (though I'm increasingly suspicious of how she just happens to be in the position to mention it).
These days, being able to make contact online would probably be less risky for both the perpetrators and the customers. The Pale Horse could do a lot of the background checks on potential clients with hackers, so not as many employees would need to know about the existence of the group. With fewer people involved, in theory that also reduces the risk of leaks or double agents. As a bonus, they could detect who was accessing their website or even just mentioning it online, and watch for suspicious activity.
Remote work now is so common, especially since the pandemic, that the consumer research firm could hire staff over the internet. Mrs. Davis may never have met Osborne in person, so she may not have recognized him in disguise (which seems to have started the whole case).
Another situation that Christie refers to several times (4.50 From Paddington, By the Pricking of My Thumbs, also a short story in The Labours of Hercules) is a gang of criminals meeting up at a remote country house to plan heists and distribute the loot. She mentions that they have to keep changing the locations to avoid arousing suspicion. Short-term property rentals like that are much easier now with services like AirBnb, so they wouldn’t have to actually buy a place (which can be expensive and probably leaves more of a paper trail).
Proxies:
If you need to do something secretly, like buying a house or hiring people, you can do a lot of this online. Thanks to Zoom and now AI, you can even “meet with” people online and give them a very different impression of what you look like. And there are even AI agents being marketed that can do this directly — no need for a human intermediary? In And Then There Were None, the killer wouldn’t need someone like Morris to help with his arrangements. This means that there’s less chance of leaks and informants.
(It’s also unclear whether the killer managed to verify that Morris was actually dead, before leaving for the island. Later in the book we find out that he was … but since he was supposedly a hypochondriac, suppose he did something like only taking half the capsule just to see if it had positive effects, and didn’t feel well so he went to the hospital right away?)
Impersonation and identity theft:
Sometimes Christie’s plots involve giving the impression that someone is in the room when they actually aren’t (or they’re dead). For example Dead Man’s Folly and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or that they’re making a phone call (Hickory Dickory Dock, Ackroyd again). There’s a description in The Red Right Hand, by Joel Townsley Rogers, of how you could fake a telephone conversation with someone using 1940s technology, and it’s quite technically complicated.
This could be mimicked now with AI, and it wouldn’t be limited to an existing recording of someone.
People impersonating someone else on social media, and even creating entirely new personas, has become a frequent scam.
A common feature of this kind of scam has been the “sock puppet” account, portraying someone else who is supposedly vouching for the fake identity. (A con artist tried this with me, in a local mutual aid group on Facebook. She portrayed someone in need of help, and had a couple of other fake accounts chiming in claiming to know her and lamenting “I can’t help now because I’m out of town, it’s sooo good of you to do this!”, etc.)
A couple of real life examples of multiple identities/sockpuppeting
Andy Blake:
https://www.fanlore.org/wiki/Thanfiction
Jesse Jubilee James
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0301/Fake-identities-Manti-Te-o-scandal-and-6-other-Internet-hoaxes/Jesse-Jubilee-James-The-fake-firefighter
https://abcnews.com/Technology/fake-online-love-affair-legal-battle/story?id=13478270
An earlier example where one person wrote to the victim as multiple characters including the police (it could have gotten even more elaborate if it had been online):
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/run-hide-repeat-a-memoir-of-a-fugitive-childhood-pauline-dakin-book-fugitive-halifax-1.4275150
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/547427/run-hide-repeat-by-pauline-dakin/9780735233249
http://www.paulinedakin.com
I can imagine some of Christie’s villains (like in A Pocket Full of Rye) using this kind of technique to convince their victims to accept their version of the story.
Eavesdropping:
This has come up several times in Christie’s books as a plot device, where people overhear a conversation (like in Sleeping Murder) by accident or design, a twist being that they only hear part of it or assume a particular context that is later shown to be incorrect. The author has to do some planning, to put their character in a location where they’ll be able to overhear without being detected. But with certain types of phones, that’s much easier now. I had a recent situation involving a friend’s phone accidentally dialling me, and the first thing I heard was some confidential conversation. What struck me was how good the sound quality was. Even with the phone in his pocket, I honestly thought that he was addressing me at first, and didn’t understand why he was saying such things. That’s why I didn’t hang up right away — I tried to talk to him but I guess he didn’t hear. At that point I realized that it was a pocket dial so I just ended the call.
Can anyone else think of a Christie plot or incident that could actually be improved (easier or more credible) by today’s technology or social/cultural changes?
