Masters of Suspense

In her autobiography, Agatha Christie writes about her second husband: "Poor Max had one serious penalty laid on him by marriage. He had, as far as I could find out, never read a novel. Katharine Woolley had forced The Murder of Roger Ackroyd upon him, but he had got out of reading it. Somebody had discussed the denouement in front of him, and after that, he said, 'What on earth is the good of reading a book when you know the end of it?' Now, however, as my husband, he started manfully on the task." This little anecdote is remarkable for at least three reasons.

First of all, imagine the hilariously deformed conception of fiction you'd have if you'd only ever read ten novels and they were all murder mysteries by your new wife. Second, Christie often didn't decide until half-way through writing who the killer would turn out to be, so oddly if you do start one of her books already knowing the ending you may actually have more information than its author at the moment she wrote those sentences. Third, in most cases, you don't read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in spite of knowing the ending, you read it because of knowing the ending, which is notorious, and brilliant. Still, perhaps that's an exception. Here's Edmund Wilson from his essay Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: "The true [murder mystery] addict, half the time, never even finds out who has committed the murder. The addict reads not to find anything out but merely to get the mild stimulation of the succession of unexpected incidents and of the suspense itself of looking forward to learning a sensational secret. That the secret is nothing at all and does not really account for the incidents does not matter to such a reader."

Does Wilson know what he's talking about here? Well, he's right that endings aren't very important. Take Christie's Ten Little Niggers. It's not the second most popular novel of all time because it has a good ending – the ending is astonishingly feeble. ("It is as complete and shameless a bamboozling of the reader as ever was perpetrated," wrote Raymond Chandler, and if anything he was being charitable.) But on the other hand Wilson is wrong that suspense is just about waiting for the ending. Suspense is an irrational atmosphere, a systematic machine designed to manipulate unsystematic minds. If you read Christie's best books already knowing the ending, the suspense is, somehow, still there. That is Christie's genius. You get the same thing with Hitchcock, and the same thing with Henri-Georges Clouzot, who, like Christie, died on this date. In Les Diaboliques, just as in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the cruel narrative tricks still work even if you know they're being played.

The truth is, though, that Christie isn't even the greatest master of suspense to have died on January 12, and nor is Clouzot. That honour goes to the French mathematician Pierre Fermat. Famously, in his copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica, next to the entry on a long-standing problem in number theory, Fermat wrote, "I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain." And for over three hundred years, until Fermat's Last Theorem was proven by Andrew Wiles in 1994, the suspense drove his colleagues crazy: in 1742, almost a century after Fermat's death, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler was still desperate enough to ask his friend Clerot to search Fermat's old house just on the remote possibility some crucial scrap of paper had been missed. And whenever GH Hardy undertook a potentially perilous sea journey, he used to send a telegram to a friend that said "HAVE SOLVED RIEMANN HYPOTHESIS STOP WILL GIVE DETAILS UPON RETURN STOP." It was an ingenious sort of insurance policy: he didn't think God would allow the world to be tantalised by such an agonising, yet spurious, loose thread. But who knows? Maybe the story of Fermat's Last Theorem is God's equivalent of a Christie novel or a Clouzot film – suspense at its most exquisite, whether you know the ending or not.

Ned Beauman used to be Commissioning Editor at Another Man, writes often for Dazed & Confused and has contributed to the Guardian, the Financial Times, and many other publications. His debut novel Boxer, Beetle will be published by Sceptre in August 2010