Witness for the Prosecution

Like most of Christie’s novels and short stories, “The Witness for the Prosecution” is best described as a mystery: The story centers on an unsolved murder, and as a solicitor, Mr. Mayherne plays a role comparable to that of a detective, conducting client interviews and researching the details of the case (in the British legal system, this kind of work is traditionally performed by a solicitor who then hands the case over to a barrister to argue in court). However, the story also departs from Christie’s usual formula in a number of key ways, beginning with the fact that it centers on a murder that has already happened, rather than one that takes place within the narrative itself. Relatedly, for most of the story, the primary source of tension is not the question of who killed Miss French, but whether Vole (whom Mayherne incorrectly believes to be innocent) will be wrongfully convicted, and why Romaine seems so determined to see him executed.

As it turns out, both of these questions are misdirected: Vole is guilty, and Romaine is actually exceptionally devoted to him, to the extent that she exposes herself to charges of perjury on his behalf. The twist at the end of the story doesn’t come entirely out of nowhere; Christie, for example, foreshadows Vole’s deceitfulness when Mayherne wonders whether “there was just a shade of hesitation” in Leonard’s response to a question about whether Miss French hoped to marry him (12). By and large, however, Christie encourages the reader to believe in Vole’s innocence up until the story’s closing words. She accomplishes this in part by relaying the story through the eyes of Mayherne, whom she immediately establishes as a careful, intelligent, and unsentimental man. Since Mayherne doesn’t seem like the kind of person to be easily taken in, his own belief in Vole’s innocence is likely to carry additional weight with the reader.

However, the very factors that would seem to make Mayherne a reliable and impartial observer prove to be a blind spot in certain circumstances. In particular, Mayherne is so put off by displays of intense emotion that the “smouldering passion” Romaine displays during his first conversation with her predisposes him to believe that she is in fact plotting against an innocent man (15). The readership for which Christie was writing would likely have shared Mayherne’s prejudices; a middle-class British audience during the interwar years would have been inclined to see Romaine as suspect both for living with a man out of wedlock, and for being Austrian.

What makes all of this especially noteworthy is the fact that it isn’t merely Christie but also Romaine who exploits Mayherne’s biases to throw him off the track of the “real” villain. In other words, Romaine is herself a kind of mystery writer, who develops characters (Mrs. Mogson, Max) and plot points (the love letters, her appearance at the theater) intended to muddy the waters and keep readers in suspense. Mayherne, meanwhile, serves as a stand-in for readers, evaluating guilt and innocence not so much by his knowledge of real-life crime, as by the tropes that govern detective fiction; at one point, for instance, he says he believes Vole is innocent because “there’s almost too much evidence against him” (17). As a result, “The Witness for the Prosecution” is not simply an example of the mystery genre but also a reflection on its conventions.