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First of all, i'm glad you finally discovered Agatha Christie - if you want a good mystery writer, you really don't have to look any further; unless you have a nack for noir, then you should try James Elroy, who's good in his own genre.
Don't think anyone before Christie ever used the killer as the narrator of the book - and that's why this book is so original - and if anyone has done it after Christie, doubt it had the same impact as The Murder or Roger Ackroyd, because Christie is quite ingenious when it comes to create murder plots. So, to answer your question, no, this isn't a typical device used in murder mysteries.
Now you shouldn't be mad at Christie for being intricate, and as you yourself said, you weren't searching for the resolution of the crime with much effort; she's quite good at planting throughout the novel clues to the murder, and her novels demand a lot of thinking, but she's even better at giving away red herrings - things that seem to be clues at first, but have the function of misleading the reader from the truth - but the fact is the clues are there nonetheless; you just have to be careful and notice them.
You read the novel again, and you'll start noticing them all over the place; there is nothing that isn't explained in the end, that can contradict what Christie wrote or her resolution of the murder. So i think it's unfair to call her dishonest.
But if you want to keep on reading mysteries novels, get ready to get annoyed a lot more - in a genre where the point is to hide the truth from the reader without lying ever, getting a reader annoyed for not reaching the truth before time i think is actually a compliment to the writer  |
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