| rdfs:comment
| - If Vera had not been so emotionally unstable at the book's end, she might have been able to spot the killer in her room, somehow trap him until the authorities came, and the mystery would've been solved. But Agatha Christie's publisher would have seen potential in this and demanded she write yet another detective series as a spin-off. Agatha foresaw this in the early stages of planning the novel and dreaded the idea of being committed to yet another detective she couldn't care less about as she already had enough on her hands (Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Col. Race, etc). Thus, she made Vera's personality less stable than originally planned and wrote in her suicide to kill any possibility of having another detective on her hands.
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| abstract
| - If Vera had not been so emotionally unstable at the book's end, she might have been able to spot the killer in her room, somehow trap him until the authorities came, and the mystery would've been solved. But Agatha Christie's publisher would have seen potential in this and demanded she write yet another detective series as a spin-off. Agatha foresaw this in the early stages of planning the novel and dreaded the idea of being committed to yet another detective she couldn't care less about as she already had enough on her hands (Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Col. Race, etc). Thus, she made Vera's personality less stable than originally planned and wrote in her suicide to kill any possibility of having another detective on her hands.
* Wait, why would Vera go free in the first place? Next to Lombard, her crime is the most heinous of the lot.
* Which was the second reason AC didn't want to write a detective spin-off about Vera: To avoid controversy over turning a child murderess into a heroine when one of her biggest asshole victims in Murder on the Orient Express was a child killer (albeit, a somewhat more heinous one), which would make her look a tad hypocritical (unless she originally planned to throw in a plot twist that it was Hugo who really did it).
* Ratched was more than just a child killer. First, the child killing in question, as in the Lindburgh (sp?) kidnapping case that inspired it, was a case of You Said You Would Let Them Go / I Lied, whereas Vera's child killing was slightly less heinous since she was emotionally desperate and jaded by love. Second, Ratched's child killing started a domino effect that resulted in four other deaths. Third, and most importantly, Ratched was a mafioso who must have been responsible for a lot more deaths than just those five over the course of his life. Fourth, Vera is slightly off her rocker, whereas Ratched is a perfectly sane Complete Monster. Nonetheless, I don't think that Agatha Christie would have ever even considered the idea of Vera being the hero of any story: she seemed to have very passionate ideas along the lines of both Humans Are Bastards and some people genuinely deserve to be murdered, and I'm betting she liked the idea of writing a story in which ten people who otherwise were karma houdinis after committing the kinds of murder/manslaughter/DrivenToSuicide actions that easily go unpunished end up getting punished anyway. I'm not saying that she sympathized with Judge Warsaw either but she definitely wanted all the characters dead. You'll notice that in her revised version in which two characters live both of them are revealed to be innocent.
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