In December 1926, Agatha Christie vanished. Her car was found abandoned on a hillside in Surrey, hundreds of people searched for her, and eleven days later she turned up at a hotel in Harrogate, registered under another name. She never explained it. Not in interviews, not in her autobiography. Not a word.
That makes her the ideal person to investigate the modern hiring process, where entire HR departments do much the same thing. It usually happens right after you’ve given up a Saturday to a psychometric test.
So I asked an AI to write it as her. Here was the prompt:
“Write a short mystery in the style of Agatha Christie about a candidate who is ghosted after three interviews and a four-hour psychometric assessment. A Miss Marple-type detective investigates the disappearance of the HR department. Keep it dry and polite, make the solution something everyday rather than sinister, and tie it back to brand - what a company says about itself versus how it behaves.”
The result is below, with my notes at the end on where the AI caught the culprit - and where it let them get away.
The Curious Case of the Vanishing HR Department
An Agatha Christie-inspired mystery, courtesy of the Useful Mischief Ghostwriters Series.
It was a perfectly ordinary Tuesday when Miss Eleanor Finch received the call.
“We have a disappearance,” said the voice at the other end.
“Good heavens. A person?”
“An entire Human Resources department.”
Miss Finch, who had spent thirty years observing the peculiarities of human behaviour, was not especially surprised.
“And when were they last seen?”
“Immediately after a psychometric assessment.”
“How very curious.”
The facts were straightforward. A candidate had attended three interviews, been described as the preferred applicant, and subsequently surrendered four hours of a Saturday to an examination involving numbers, shapes and questions designed to establish whether he could be trusted with a stapler.
Then, silence.
Three emails had been sent. Each was polite. Each had gone unanswered.
Miss Finch examined the correspondence.
“Perhaps,” suggested Inspector Bell, “the emails were lost.”
“All three?”
“An administrative oversight?”
“An oversight generally occurs once, Inspector. Three times suggests either a system or a preference.”
The inspector considered this.
“Perhaps the position was filled.”
“Then why not say so?”
“Perhaps the candidate was unsuitable.”
“Then why not say that?”
“Perhaps they were terribly busy.”
Miss Finch looked at him over her spectacles.
“My dear Inspector, people have found time to write letters during wars.”
The inspector shifted uncomfortably.
“Perhaps they've been attending meetings.”
“Ah,” said Miss Finch. “That would explain it. Nothing prevents work quite as efficiently as a meeting about work.”
She turned her attention to the company's website.
There were photographs of smiling employees, a lengthy declaration of corporate values, and the words People Are Our Greatest Asset in a typeface large enough to be seen from space.
“Remarkable,” she murmured.
“What is?”
“They seem to have misplaced one of their assets.”
“Then I don't see how we can solve the case,” said the inspector.
“Oh, but we already have.”
Miss Finch folded the correspondence and returned it to its envelope.
“Nobody has disappeared, Inspector. The department is exactly where it has always been. At its desks, attending meetings, discussing culture and putting the word people into PowerPoint presentations.”
“Then what, precisely, is the crime?”
“Something considerably more commonplace than murder.”
She rose to leave.
“Bad manners.”
The inspector looked disappointed.
“Hardly a matter for Scotland Yard.”
“No,” agreed Miss Finch. “But quite possibly one for the marketing department.”
For it is a curious thing that a company may spend a fortune persuading strangers to think well of it, then undo a little of that work for the price of a reply.
The End.
My notes, as the human in the room:
Miss Finch is Miss Marple in a different cardigan, and the machine knows it. That’s the right call. Marple solves crimes by recognising the type, because she’s seen this behaviour in the village before. “An oversight generally occurs once. Three times suggests either a system or a preference” is exactly how she thinks. It also gets Christie’s sentences right: short, plain, mostly dialogue. Christie was never a stylist, and it doesn’t try to make her one.
Where it slips: Christie played fair. She hid the clues in plain sight, so you could, in theory, beat the detective to the answer. There are no clues here. There are no suspects, no red herring, and no moment where you think it’s the vicar. The solution is announced, not deduced, and it’s the one you guessed from the title. Christie’s whole trick was the least likely culprit. Bad manners is the most likely one.
The jokes give it away too. “Trusted with a stapler” and a typeface “seen from space” are a modern columnist’s lines, not hers. Christie’s humour was drier, and she never winked at the reader. Then there’s the last paragraph: a moral, tidily delivered by a narrator who wasn’t there a moment ago. It’s the same tell as the Tolstoy piece (see the one on personal branding, if you wish). The machine can’t leave the room without a clean endline. Christie would have ended on the inspector.
The bit that got me: “quite possibly one for the marketing department.” That’s the whole point, and not one I forced. Every candidate left waiting is a customer, or knows one, and they’re all forming a view of the brand. Companies spend millions telling strangers they care about people, then quietly prove otherwise for the price of an email.
Case closed. If anyone from HR is reading this, a one-line reply will do. (Also, this is just a little bit of mischief…)
