The paper investigates the interestingness of crime stories by Agatha Christie. The rules governing the plot and the story suggest that the interestingness of these books is based not on the elements of the plot or the story themselves but on the readers' need of creating and updating their belief structures. The readers' limited processing capabilities and their limited memory seems to drive an inference process which is manipulated by the author. Several of the factors that make readers find a book interesting are determined. As for the applicability of formal methods, the paper is rather pessimistic.
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