Agatha Christie and Orson Welles

Christie’s writings are very cinematic and Murder in Mesopotamia, it should be noted, precedes Welles’ onion layers in Citizen Kane, which carries this style to its logical conclusion, where exploration of character is the plot, or vice versa, if you prefer... Christie is better at it because her writing is absent from the pomposity that Welles favored, but both artists always understood at a fundamental level that storytellers can never be trusted, including novelists, historians, politicians, preachers and all the other propagandists. These artists make it perfectly clear that their greatest enemy was authoritarian thinking – that inherently human tendency to settle on one explanation for anything, as “the truth.”