I just don’t buy the ending. I get that the book was written in 1939 before the age of the internet, but I just dont buy that the detective wouldn’t notice that the Judge wasn’t actually dead. Even if Lombard’s revolver was a small caliber, when people get shot they leak, like a lot. There would’ve been a pool of blood on the ground. There likely would’ve been skull fragments and brain matter all over the wall behind him. I can appreciate that the Doctor was in on the plan but the Detective wasn’t, and he would have known that the Judge wasn’t shot.
Even if the Doctor and the Detective were both in on it, when the Judge rigs up the gun at in the end the police who came to the island would have been able to see that he had been killed in bed and a full day after he was supposed to have died, but they make zero mention of it.
I get it, it’s a twist, but it felt really cheap and unbelievable to me. Are Agatha Christie’s other books like this? I bought the Barns and Noble version that includes two other books of hers and I’m not sure I want to invest the time into reading them if her endings subvert our expectations solely because they’re so unbelievable they genuinely don’t make sense to a modern audience that has actually seen what real crime scenes look like.
by Intelligent-Hawkeye