Nothing new?

It’s desperately difficult to be truly original when writing a novel, no matter how hard one tries. There are a few landmark books that do seem to pass that test of originality – yet, on closer inspection, doubts may set in.

One example is Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The ingenious solution caused outrage (misplaced, surely) when the book came out in 1926. Yet Christie had made a gesture towards the same plot device in an earlier book, The Man in the Brown Suit. And later in came to light that Anton Chekhov, no less, had written a book with a similar twist called The Shooting Party, back in 1884.

Christie’s And Then There Were None is another all-time classic. But the idea of a closed circle of characters trapped by a mysterious adversary had been done before – by the husband and wife duo Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning, in The Invisible Host.

And then there is Kenneth Fearing’s masterly The Big Clock, twice brilliantly filmed. The idea of a man being set to investigate himself was used later, by Derek Marlowe in A Dandy in Aspic. But now it seems, from an article by David Ellis in the latest issue of CADS, that the basic plot was used earlier, by Bruce Graeme, in a book I'd never heard of before, Not Proven (1935.)

There are all kinds of similarities that can be found in superficially very different books. The device in Christie’s The ABC Murders has often been used, for instance by writers as different from her as Ed McBain and Lee Child. But this is definitely not a sign of lack of originality, in my opinion – it’s a challenge for any writer to breathe new life into an old idea, and very satisfying when it comes off, as it did when McBain and Child spun their own variations on the basic theme.

For what it’s worth, I think it unlikely that Christie had read either The Shooting Party or The Invisible Host when she wrote those masterpieces that have some resemblance to the earlier books. Different people frequently come up with the same idea at different times (and, when it’s a topical idea, often at much the same time.) Incidentally, The Shooting Party is rather enjoyable, and well worth seeking out. As for The Invisible Host, I’m hoping to read it soon.