TCDE-Team at 21:00, 17 February 2026

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			\|summary=The article compares Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie by showing how both use narrative style as deliberate misdirection, though in opposite ways. Conan Doyle's swift, dialogue-driven brilliance distracts through energy, while Christie's plain, trustworthy prose conceals clues through calculated deceptiveness.
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	''Lest Men See Too Much At Once'' is an article written by [[Robert Barnard]] published in the [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 1, No. 2) in march 1990.		''Lest Men See Too Much At Once'' is an article written by [[Robert Barnard]] published in the [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 1, No. 2) in march 1990.

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TCDE-Team at 21:58, 6 February 2026

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	''Lest Men See Too Much At Once'' is an article written by [[Robert Barnard]] published in the [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 1, No. 2) in march 1990.		''Lest Men See Too Much At Once'' is an article written by [[Robert Barnard]] published in the [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 1, No. 2) in march 1990.

			The article compares [[Arthur Conan Doyle]] and Agatha Christie by showing how both use narrative style as deliberate misdirection, though in opposite ways. [[Arthur Conan Doyle\|Conan Doyle]]'s swift, dialogue-driven brilliance distracts through energy, while Christie's plain, trustworthy prose conceals clues through calculated deceptiveness.

TCDE-Team: Created page with "{{Cargo_Research_Articles |date=1990-03-01 |author=Robert Barnard |topic=Narration }} ''Lest Men See Too Much At Once'' is an article written by Robert Barnard published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 1, No. 2) in march 1990. == Lest Men See Too Much At Once == [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (march 1990,..."

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Created page with "{{Cargo_Research_Articles |date=1990-03-01 |author=Robert Barnard |topic=Narration }} ''Lest Men See Too Much At Once'' is an article written by Robert Barnard published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 1, No. 2) in march 1990. == Lest Men See Too Much At Once == thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (march 1990,..."

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{{Cargo_Research_Articles
|date=1990-03-01
|author=Robert Barnard
|topic=Narration
}}
''Lest Men See Too Much At Once'' is an article written by [[Robert Barnard]] published in the [[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (Vol. 1, No. 2) in march 1990.

== Lest Men See Too Much At Once ==
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1990-03-p87-lest-men-see-too-much-at-once.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (march 1990, p. 87)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1990-03-p88-lest-men-see-too-much-at-once.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (march 1990, p. 88)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1990-03-p89-lest-men-see-too-much-at-once.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (march 1990, p. 89)]]
[[File:Acd-society-journal-1990-03-p90-lest-men-see-too-much-at-once.jpg|thumb|250px|right|[[A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society]] (march 1990, p. 90)]]

'''A note on the narrative art of Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie'''

: "... A dusk mis-featured messenger...
:: Whose care is lest men see too much at once."
::: ''Browning'': The Ring and the Book, i, 593.

One has heard it so often: talk of the "wonderful evocation of late-Victorian England... the famous gas-lit, fog-murky, four-wheeler London"; "richly atmospheric sketches of Baker Street..." and so on.

It is not so much the statements as the implications one wants to quarrel with: yes, the [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] stories are atmospheric, but no, they do not contain long stretches of descriptive writing which evoke the London pavements under rain, the twinkle of gas-lights in the fog, the sounds of a four-wheeler. The stories are economical, business-like in their telling — this is as much part and parcel of their appeal as the cunning of their plotting.

I have said this so often to students and others that it was almost a shock to come across one piece of atmospheric scene-painting recently, when re-reading [[The Sign of Four]]:

: ''It was a September evening, and not yet seven o'clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light, which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare...''

And so on for some three-quarters of a page. The passage inflicts an aesthetic shock as well, so starkly does it stand out from the surrounding narrative. There is another, comparable passage later in the novel, when [[Dr. Watson|Watson]] catches a glimpse of his wife-to-be, waiting alone in a room, unconscious of his presence:

: ''She was seated by the open window, dressed in some sort of white, diaphanous material, with a little touch of scarlet at the neck and waist. The soft light of a shaded lamp fell upon her as she leaned back in the basket chair, playing over her sweet grave face, and tinting with a dull, metallic sparkle the rich coils of her luxuriant hair. One white arm and hand drooped over the side of the chair, and her whole pose and figure spoke of an absorbing melancholy.''

There is an odd quality about both these passages: both of them remind me of descriptions of pictures (and that in spite of the fact that the first is a moving scene, seen through the windows of one of those four-wheelers), rather than the usual descriptive passages in novels. The first is an impressionist canvas, the second a Victorian domestic interior. They seem, in short, more posed than felt. I think this is because they sit unnaturally in the narrative, they interrupt its speed of movement, and they strive for effect in a narration that has hitherto been, or managed to seem, remarkably unselfconscious.

Their awkwardness, or even falseness, highlights the usual qualities of [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s narratives: tautness, directness, economy. These qualities are achieved as often as not through dialogue — dialogue that delights and intrigues us generally through the play of contrasts. In the [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]]-[[Dr. Watson|Watson]] exchanges the contrast is brilliance against steadiness, sharp insight against struggling common sense (let us hear no more, please, about [[Dr. Watson|Watson]]'s "stupidity". [[Dr. Watson|Watson]] is us). And when clients, suspects, and the assorted eccentrics, undesirables and common-or-garden humanity that people the tales come in, new contrasts and new tensions are set up, again principally through dialogue. The short passages describing events, discoveries, tend to be interruptions to the continual sparkle and interest of the talk.

For what talk it is! Several writers have commented on the perfect phrasing of the "dog in the night-time" exchange. What bas been less noted is the fact that it is the tension of contrasts in exchanges like this that carry one irresistibly ahead, so that one doesn't stop to notice that the significance of the dog doing nothing in the night-time is really quite easy to guess — as are the purpose of the [[REDH|Red-Headed League]] and the identity of [[Mary Sutherland|Miss Mary Sutherland]]'s fiance. It also allows us to jump over awkward questions such as why the [[RESI|Resident Patient]] should choose to finance a fashionable doctor of feeble prowess, with patients coming all the time to his house, rather than buying a house of his own, fortifying it, and employing a resident bodyguard. What we have is a conjuring trick based on style — of style that masks the simplicity of the problem [[Sherlock Holmes|Holmes]] is sometimes presented with, or prevents us mulling too much over the details of the mysterious situation. The strength of the cut-and-thrust dialogue provides a sort of misdirection — just as, in a different way, the apparently plodding nature of Agatha Christie's prose (the sort of prose that might be written by a junior reporter sent on a dull story) does too.

The easiest way to talk nonsense about writing is to ignore what the writing is for. There has emerged a sort of consensus over the years about the quality of Christie's writing: banal, flat, cliche-ridden, penny plain - these are the sort of descriptions we meet most often (I regret to say I have used them myself, and there are prominent crime writers today who regularly come out with them in interviews). The adjectives rather ignore the fact that, for example, the last line of the short story "Witness for the Prosecution" ("My dear Mr. Maybeme, you do not see at all. I knew he was guilty")is as brilliant in its way, and in context, as the "dog in the night-time" exchange. I remember thrilling to it in childhood in a radio adaptation (the stage version is another matter entirely). But let's agree that if you take a chunk of Christie — whether dialogue or description — and slap it down in the middle of a critical dissertation, it will look exactly as the critics describe it: cliche-ridden, flat, and so on.

But the crucial question is: what is her writing for?

And the answer is that its intention is to deceive. Not to illumine, enlighten, enlarge understanding, as with most classic fiction writers, but to deceive. The element of challenge to the reader in [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]] — "I will mystify you" — is intensified in Christie into: "I will deceive you". In the contract between writer and reader, established in the course of an exceptionally prolific writing life, there grew up the declaration on her part that she would lead her reader up the garden path, and the determination on his that this time he would not be so led.

The banal surface of much of Christie's writing is part of this intention to deceive. The stylistic pyrotechnics of a Dickens or a Conrad achieve many things, but trust is not one of the things one thinks of first. A plodding, unembroidered, utterly conventional telling does achieve just that: such a narrator, the reader unconsciously assumes, must be presenting what be sees or bears without artifice or trickery because he is such a dull dog. Thus, when the narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, at the finding of the body, says "Ackroyd was sitting as I had left him in the armchair before the fire" the reader does not realise that this is both literally true and misleading - Ackroyd is sitting exactly as he was sitting when the narrator left him, because then, as now, he was dead. Half a page later we have:

: ''I did what little had to be done. I was careful not to disturb the position of the body, and not to handle the dagger at all. No object was to be attained by moving it. Ackroyd had clearly been dead some little time.''

Not one reader in a thousand will notice that the second sentence details what he did not do, not (as seems to be promised by the first) what he did do, and wonder what these things he did were. Nor will be see that the typically stiff sentence "No object was to be attained by moving it" is ambiguous, seeming to look forward to the next sentence about Ackroyd being dead, but also carrying the undertow that there was no advantage to be gained in his murder plot by any shifting or interfering with the body. Almost all Dr. Sheppard's narration is shot through with similar ambiguities. No wonder Christie remarks in her Autobiography on the "enormous difficulties" that the idea for the book brought with it.

Ackroyd, it may be objected, was an exception, with its narrator/murderer causing unique problems. Yet comparable examples of cunning in the writing, where an apparently plodding style conceals vital ambiguities, could be quoted from more orthodox stories. Always the trick is that the penny-plainness of the narrative creates a condition of mind in the reader that blinds him to the planting of a clue. Sometimes Christie is so confident in her own technique that the same clue or related clues are shoved under our noses time and time again, without rousing us from our intellectual sleep. Within a few pages of each other in ''Hercule Poirot's Christmas'' we have:

: ''"Superintendent Sugden drew a doubtful finger along his jawbone."''
: ''"Looking after (Sugden) Hilda said: 'I didn't now he was with you. I thought he was with Pilar.'"''
: ''"Lydia said: 'Good morning, M. Poirot. Tresilian told me I should find you out here with Harry, but I'm glad to find you alone.'"''
: ''"Sugden stroked his jaw reflectively."''
: ''"'Who's out there in the garden? Superintendent Sugden, or Mr. Farr?'"''

Thus the resemblances between Superintendent Sugden and Simon Lee's brood — resemblances in physique, gesture, etc. — are emphasised, confusions between him and them multiply, though they are never allowed to be more than casual and momentary, and the moment is prepared for when Christie will pull the first of her policeman-as-murderer tricks — one which is really allied to the narrator/side-kick trick: we have placed our trust where we have been accustomed to place trust, and we have had the carpet pulled out from under us.

The stories of these two writers, then, represent triumphs of style. The two styles are themselves on the surface very different, even markedly contrasting. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s narrative, mostly in dialogue, is svelte, fast, coruscating: it is bravura stuff that has the reader scurrying after him, revelling in the sharp or subtle clashes of character or attitude. Christie's, by contrast, seems gauche, ordinary, the writing of somebody who may be a born storyteller but is far from a born writer. This impression is misleading, for we are judging Christie on [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Doyle]]'s terms. Christie's writing arouses trust in the reader, and that trust brings with it an acceptance that the surface meaning of the text is the real meaning. In fact trust is the last feeling we ought to have towards a writer whose aim is to deceive us, and the surface meaning in fact conceals a seething mass of secondary meanings, among which will be found the clues to her solution.

Though the styles are so different they have this in common: they are essentially pieces of misdirection. Both writers understood intimately the relationship of a reader to a printed text, and they used that understanding to persuade him to concentrate on something other than the vital parts of the mystery. Their styles are essential components of their art, as they go about their business of mystifying or fooling.

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Lest Men See Too Much At Once - Revision history

TCDE-Team at 21:00, 17 February 2026

TCDE-Team at 00:05, 7 February 2026

TCDE-Team at 21:58, 6 February 2026