Wrong People Will Tell You Who They Are

Agatha Christie, Human Nature, and the Need to Know WHY

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” —Maya Angelou

We repeat this quote all over social media and between friends. Well, women do. I don’t know about the fellas. But it’s rare to find someone who actually practices it.

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I’m watching The Following, a thriller series that’s from the 2010s. In the first episode, the writers showed their hand in what I thought was a sloppy way. It was obvious that this man was one of the serial killer’s cult members… one of the titular Following. But I wasn’t overly annoyed by it; episodic tv has its own limitations, and sometimes you can’t conceal the fact you’re putting a chair on stage because someone’s gonna sit in it.

But then there are guilt-signalling behaviors that go unnoticed by the audience. Most of it anyway. I’m one of the few who picks up on them. Maybe it’s because ripping people’s stories apart is my job. Or maybe it’s something a little deeper than that.

Fiction, ironically, is where the issue of people ignoring red flags becomes clearest. Mystery stories give us controlled environments—all the information we need, neatly contained. The plots are finite. The clues are planted deliberately. And audiences still miss what's in front of them. Not because the clues are hidden, but because we've been trained to explain away behavior that should alarm us.

The Grief-Stricken Mother

For instance, last weekend, I was watching Seven Dials on Netflix, an Agatha Christie adaptation. I’ll be spoiling it, but given the book is over 80 years old I think that’s okay.

Helena Bonham Carter plays Lady Caterham, mother to our detective, Bundle. She plays her quirky at best, maybe actively strange due to losing both her son and her husband. The family estate is falling apart. She can’t afford staff. Fine. Grief does things to people.

But then Bundle asks her mother about Alfred. He’d been a footman at the family manor for years, but resigned. Now he’s working at a nightclub that keeps coming up in Bundle’s investigation. According to Alfred, he resigned because he asked for his wages and Lady Caterham refused. This is shocking to Bundle. Good help is hard to find and Alfred was by every metric a wonderful member of staff. To not pay him is beyond the pale.

“Why did Alfred leave?”

Lady Caterham’s first response: “No one by that name ever worked for me.”

Bundle presses. Yes, he did. For years.

Lady Caterham shifts: “Well, I don’t make those staffing decisions. Someone else must have handled it.”

But Bundle knows better. Lady Caterham had personally managed the household. She’d made that decision herself.

Bundle passed it off as Mummy being her eccentric self. But not me. I knew then that dear old mum had something to do with it all.

And I was right.

And to be clear her motive made sense. She was sickened by grief over her son being used as cannon fodder in WW1, enraged at a country she felt betrayed her family. And she needed money to save an estate she couldn’t afford. You could understand it.

But that doesn’t matter. She looked her daughter in the face and denied reality. Denied the existence of a person they both knew. Then shifted her story when that didn’t work. Then tried to redirect with vague warnings.

Bundle let it pass because she loves her mother, respects the weight on her shoulders. But she shouldn’t have. That moment should have made clear to her that her mother was not on her side. There was no way Bundle could have guessed the extent of it. She didn’t need to.

She should have known her mother was wrong. She didn’t move right. She didn’t act right. She was wrong. And spotting when a person is wrong will always give you the answers you need.

The Devouring Mother

Another Christie adaptation, A Haunting in Venice, had something similar.

Poirot is interviewing Rowena Drake, the hostess of a séance where someone’s been murdered. Her daughter Alicia supposedly threw herself from a balcony into the canal a year earlier. Rowena presents herself as a grieving mother desperate to contact her dead child.

In speaking about her daughter, Rowena mentions—casually, as context—that upon hearing of Alicia’s engagement, she came outside and ripped out her entire rose garden. Defaced the flowers she and her daughter had cultivated together over years.

Why? She didn’t approve of the man.

The actress performed it so casually. Poirot, as is his wont, barely reacted.

But I caught it.

She was wrong.

How easy to pass it off as a fit of emotion, the unhinged distress of a woman. You can justify just about anything, if you want to. But why do we want to? Her reaction was utterly psychotic. You don’t tear up a garden because you dislike your daughter’s fiancé. You don’t destroy something you built together because she’s planning a life that doesn’t center on you. Not unless something is deeply, fundamentally wrong with how you understand love and control and ownership of another person.

Would the audience have just nodded and sympathized if a male character had behaved in this way? You’ll never catch me saying the sexes are the same… but crazy is crazy, and possessive control isn’t cute, no matter who does it.

I knew immediately that this woman was our murderer. Not only of the psychic Poirot was investigating, but of Alicia as well.

And I was right.

She’d replanted that garden with rhododendrons—whose pollen makes hallucinogenic honey. Fed it to Alicia in her tea. Kept her sedated, delirious, dependent.

Guess you won’t love anyone except me, now will you, darling?

When the housekeeper accidentally gave her too much one night, Alicia died. And Rowena, loving mother, threw the body from the balcony to stage a suicide.

The garden told you everything. She would rather destroy than lose control.

Red Flags Aren’t Riddles

To be fair, red flags are easier to spot in movies. The plots are contained. You’ve been given all the information you actually need.

Real life is messier. Often you have to be content knowing you might be overreacting. The red flag you’re seeing might signal that this person is a danger to you. Or maybe you’re picking up the fact that they like to hurt animals. Or they watch violent porn. ONLY violent porn. Two of those things make it reasonable to cut this person out of your life. The third... maybe not. That’s for you to decide.

The problem is that many of us think we should ignore these flags entirely, lest we act rashly. Why is that? Why do most of us tolerate not just bad but alarming behavior?

“Oh, people lie to cover embarrassment. We’ve all done it.”

Fair enough. Yes. I often lie when someone asks me a question that’s overstepping. It’s too personal. It’s not information they’re entitled to. And instead of presuming to chastise their overstep (I’m not their mother, after all), I just lie. I’m not sorry and I’ll do it again. This tells you something about my specific psychology. Or pathology, if you want to call it that.

But that’s different from me looking you dead in the face and lying about something you just saw with your own eyes.

An interaction like this, for instance:

You: “Why didn’t you put your shopping cart away? Someone’s car could get scratched.”

Me: I did put my shopping cart away. How dare you say that about me.

You: "I literally just watched you leave it there."

Me: “Are you stupid? [Yelling now] Get away from me, you creep!”

I just looked you in the face, told you that you didn’t see what you saw, insulted you, and then yelled as if I was in danger, tacitly looking for passersby to protect me, and think ill of you.

This is an entirely different lie. Different pathology. Not something you should ignore.

But often we do. “She had past trauma.” Or: “You started the confrontation; she just matched your energy.”

We’re in a place now where we’ll excuse just about anything as long as there’s a “reason.”

We’re obsessed with why to the point that even with dead-to-rights physical evidence, D.A.s get nervous in criminal trials if there’s no clear motive. I always say we learn more from fiction than we do real life, and our insistence on understanding a situation instead of reacting to it is part of that.

We’ve decided that understanding someone’s psychology is a prerequisite for reacting to their behavior.

It isn’t.

I don’t need a person’s whole psychological makeup before I decide whether I do or do not wish to give them further access to my life.

But many do. “I’m sure there’s a good reason they did that. I’m sure I’m overreacting.”

A good question to ask: what’s the worst consequence of overreacting and distancing yourself?

You hurt their feelings. Okay.

Now what’s the best possible outcome if you’re right? You avoid getting scammed. Or harmed. Or made to hate your life because of the presence of a malignant taker.

But people don’t weigh these consequences because they’re so afraid of looking foolish. Or of being wrong in general. No one wants to look stupid. Or look mean. Even at the expense of their safety or sanity.

That’s the thing about ignoring red flags. In a movie, that makes for a satisfying ending. You don’t see the twist coming. The detective explains everything in the final act and you think, Oh, of course—it was right there all along.

But in real life, there’s no satisfaction in solving the riddle of someone else’s pathology.

There’s just the hope you get out unscathed.

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Sometimes people overlook red flags because they want to keep collecting a paycheck. Understandable, but still dangerous, as one ghostwriter found out. The Twitter Crush, a new epistolary thriller, is now available.