
Unlike other, more gruesome detective stories, Christie’s novel is firmly set in the polite, “civilized” upper- and middle-class world of Britain in the first half of the 20th century. The predictability of this theme within the novel is something the reader can count on with certainty. The question is not if order will be restored and good will triumph, simply how. Sheppard, writing after the fact, repeatedly reminds the reader that Poirot has already done so.

The reader has no doubt that Poirot will solve the case because Dr. Christie leans even more into this pattern in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

In a Sherlock Holmes novel, for example, the reader has no doubt that Holmes will solve the case even before finishing the first chapter – it is simply the pattern of the genre. Most detective fiction involves the satisfying restoration of order by a brilliant detective or team of detectives after a cunning and malicious evil-doer has committed some crime. Buy Study Guide The Triumph of Good and the Restoration of Order
