Instructor Spotlight: Sam Youkeles

What inspired you to teach this course?

As a computer science student, it might be unsurprising to hear that reading is not my strong suit. However, when it comes to Agatha Christie’s detective fiction novels, I become an avid reader. In the past few years, I have churned through many of her novels, and realized that we can learn something valuable about storytelling by analyzing her work. My passion for Agatha Christie’s writing style inspired me to create a course to answer the question: how does Christie write detective fiction in a way that is accessible and compelling to people with a wide variety of reading backgrounds?

Do you have a favorite Agatha Christie story?

My favorite Agatha Christie novel is And Then There Were None. This might also be her most famous story, and for good reason. Christie is a master at creating seemingly impossible series of events with perfectly reasonable explanations to them. The premise of And Then There Were None is simple, yet terrifying: 10 people are stranded on an island, and one of them is a murderer. This unknown murderer begins killing people one by one, and those that remain must identify the killer before it’s too late. This novel is dark, foreboding, and hard to put down.

What do you hope that students will take away from your course?

First and foremost, I hope that students are able to experience the magic that I felt when I read Agatha Christie’s novels for the first time. Reading her stories alongside a group of peers is especially rewarding because Christie’s novels are laden with tiny details. When many students work together to solve a mystery, some identify clues that others have missed.

For each novel that we cover in this course, I instruct students to read almost all the way to the end of the book, but I make them stop reading before the culprit is revealed. Students come to class with all the clues before them to conduct an “investigation,” working together to try to solve the mystery before the solution is revealed to them. Christie is a very clever writer, and solving her mysteries is quite a challenge. Despite this, the students in this course have been able to solve two out of the three novels we have read so far!

This spring, Sam Youkeles (he/him) is teaching EXP-0055-S: Playing Detective: Unraveling the Mysteries of Agatha Christie. Sam is a senior from Arlington, Virginia. He’s majoring in Computer Science, with a minor in Human Factors Engineering. He’s part of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, as well as the Tufts Chess Club.