A Reading Room for Detective Fiction

I have put a reading room on this site: every Agatha Christie detective title in the United States public domain — ten novels and three story collections, 1920 to 1930. You can start reading here.

Setting the type was not the problem. Standard Ebooks had already done that by hand, and most of these texts are theirs. The companion was. A reading assistant for fiction is easy to describe and hard to build, because the useful version has read the whole book and the honest version has not.

So it is only ever handed the book up to the paragraph you have reached. The harder half is that truncating the text does not truncate the model’s memory: any model worth asking has read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and knows exactly what makes it famous. It is told to treat its own recollection as inadmissible, down to the quiet tells — not confirming a theory, not warming up when you happen to guess right.

It also ranks every character at the end of each chapter, one line per suspect, drawn only as far as you have read. In Styles the name that ends at 98% sits near 55% early and collapses to 10% in the middle — the model taken in at precisely the point Christie intends. That is not what recall looks like.

These books are public domain in the United States only. Christie died in 1976, so elsewhere they remain in copyright until 2047; the rights page sets out every title.