Last year I read my first ever Agatha Christie novel and enjoyed the experience so much that I put another on this year’s list. Without a better idea of where to start I hunted up works published by Christie in 1925 and the short story now known as The Witness for the Prosecution fit the bill. I didn’t know much going in about what the story contained and decided that was probably for the best.
This 50-minute audio (read by the incomparable Christopher Lee) is an excellent example of how Christie honed in on the mechanics of writing to tell her tales. By its nature, a short story is stripped down to the basics. In the case of a murder mystery, that would be the murder, the suspects, and the motive. In this case Christie places the prime suspect’s lawyer in the place of what would normally be a detective (professional or otherwise) as the action of this story is removed from the murder itself and instead focused on the trial. What this does is allow Christie to streamline the way in which the plot points are put together while still providing interest. Because all the while the reader knows it can’t possibly be as straightforward as initially presented (otherwise there’s no need for a story at all). But this is Christie, so one twist inevitably leads to another, and this story ends on one heck of a line that puts everything before it in a new light.
After I finished I did some research into possible adaptations I could watch and ended up deciding that the Wilder one from 1957 is the only one I’m really interested in (it’s based on Christie’s own adaptation of the story to a play but it does change the ending a bit), but I don’t currently have a way to stream it so that might have to wait a bit.