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By Root 5364 0

the endless recycling of the same set of stereotypes, that there are really only two ways in which the authors of such stories can maintain the illusion of originality necessary to keep their audience's interest alive. The first is through the skill by which they turn their heroes into sufficiently distinctive two-dimensional characters, defined by their quirky habits and catch-phrases; the game at which Conan Doyle in creating Holmes was the supreme master. The other is through the ingenuity with which they can find new intellectual twists to what is essentially such a limited and repetitive formula. This was one reason why Agatha Christie was so successful, in that she managed to come up with one permutation on the basic formula after another: ranging from a story in which every one of the many possible suspects turns out to be equally guilty (Murder on the Orient Express) to that in which the culprit turns out to be the story's narrator and the detective's own Watson-like confidant (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd).

In a sense the most ingenious twist of all, however, was that used by Agatha Christie in what was to become, in commercial terms, the most successful version of a detective story ever put on the stage. Was it entirely coincidental that this should have been the only example of a modern `whodunnit' where the person who committed the crime turns out to have been the detective himself? The Mousetrap may have no pretensions to psychological profundity or to be considered as great literature. But is it possible that, in this unique twist to the formula, the millions of theatregoers who helped to make it the longest-running stage production in history should have done so because they caught in it just the faintest echo of one of the most profound issues which lie at the heart of storytelling: the real drama implicit in a man discovering not someone else's guilt, which is easy, but his own? 3

`Born thus, I ask to be no other man, Than that I am, and will know who I am.'

Oedipus, Sophocles, King Oedipus

`This above all, to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.'

Polonius, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3

`What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god; the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?'

Hamlet, Act II, Scene 1

`Wonders are many on earth, and the greatest of these is man ... he is master of ageless Earth ... he is lord of all things living ... the use of language, the wind-swift motion of brain he learnt; found out the ways of living together in cities ... there is nothing beyond his power. His subtlety meeteth all chance, all danger conquereth, for every ill he found its remedy, save only death. 0 wondrous subtlety of man, that draws him either to good or evil ways!'

Sophocles, Antigone

We end this third section of the book by looking at what may be regarded as the two supreme puzzle stories in world literature. The first is the Greek myth of Oedipus, as portrayed by Sophocles in the most searching trio of plays to have come down to us from the ancient world. The other is Hamlet, the most enigmatic of Shakespeare's tragedies. In unravelling the seeming ambiguity of these tales we return again, more deeply than ever, to the heart of what our need to tell stories is about.

The first puzzle of the Oedipus myth is how it includes two separate stories which in a sense may seem to contradict each other. The first tells how a young man wandering in exile comes to the city of Thebes which is suffering under the shadow of a fearful monster. The Sphinx, literally `the strangler, is half-woman, half-beast, who lives by the roadside over a precipice near the city. She stops every traveller on the road to pose a riddle. `What moves on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three in the evening?' No traveller can give an answer, and the Sphinx pushes