I don't suppose it's entirely fair of me to say that I got the best of Agatha this time. While true that I guessed at her tricks well ahead of the ending, I was aided by two things: the endorsement on the back cover that promised "an ingenious and surprising twist," and my knowledge of her tendency to choose the most surprising outcome possible. Thus forewarned, who else but the narrator could it have been? what other ending would satisfy those criteria?
My own cleverness in predicting the ending, however, pales in comparison to that of the writer in constructing it. The mechanism of the book in one's hand being the very book mentioned in the story is a favorite mechanism of mine, and Christie executes the trick as deftly as, if not more so than, Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle. Christie had to speak with two voices here, the writer's and the narrator's, and keep them both firmly in hand throughout. The balancing act between revealing what the writer would want without confounding the narrator is so deft as to be invisible. It is especially satisfying as a feat that would be utterly unsuitable for other media, and I can only imagine that any filmed version is a pale shadow of the printed.
Add that to Christie's gift for characterization, mastery of pacing, and playful misdirection, and one has a book that transcends her others and, by my definition at least, becomes something very like literature.
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