Unimaginative tourists get trapped at Agatha Christie’s manor, don’t murder anybody

In what we can only call out as a fundamental mis-firing of the human imagination, a hundred or so tourists got trapped at Agatha Christie’s manor house this week—and failed, utterly, to produce even a single deviously brainteasing murder in the process.

This comes from CNN, which reports that a tree fell on the single road into Christie’s countryside estate, Greenway, on Friday, stranding 100 people—including tourists and staff—at the Devon-set building, which is operated by the U.K.’s National Trust. And, sure, things started off well enough: People played croquet on the lawn and sipped tea, all standard activities for the first 15 pages of an Agatha Christie novel. But then, tragically, not a single person then decided to take this golden opportunity—closed location, no police, numerous poisonable liquids in abundance—to eliminate a romantic rival, secure a much-coveted inheritance, or simply enact a decades-long revenge with a little light murdering. It really is depressing.

It’s worth noting that Christie herself clearly thought Greenway a fine place for a little light trimming of the shrub humanity; she often used her house as an inspiration for the murder settings in her books, even setting a few (1956's Dead Man Folly, for instance) at Greenway itself. None of which appears to have moved the deeply unambitious tourists, who, despite ostensibly being Christie fans, apparently felt no great urge to lock a room and then do a murder in it. Instead, they merely killed time, waiting until the tree was removed on Friday evening, allowing them—all of them, infuriatingly—to leave. At no point was a fussy Belgian or hyper-observant older lady called on to do anything but, presumably, take a few whacks with the mallet and sip a little more tea.

This generation, god, we really just don’t know.