A couple of months ago I discovered Agatha Christie.

Previous to that I had never actually read a novel by her, partly because I had been put off by the rather prissy, very English, format of a lot of British television adaptations.

Her novels are actually rather wittier than you would think from the tv adaptations, and actually tell you quite a lot about how society in post world war one England functioned, as well as being fun to read.

Since then I’ve read one or two of her novels, usually by downloading the public domain Project Gutenberg edition to my kindle, and currently I’m reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

I won’t recount the story, if you’ve read the book you know it, and if you havn’t I won’t spoil the story, and anyway, there’s a synopsis on wikipedia.

However, one thing puzzles me about the book – where one would normally write clue, she writes clew.

The Gutenberg Edition is based on the US Grosset and Dunlap 1926 edition (Grossett and Dunlap were an imprint of the much larger Dodd Mead and Company which among other things published mystery and crime novels in the 1920s and 30s). It’s possible that if you have a different edition you won’t have this seemingly aberrant spelling.

Clew is quite obviously an alternative spelling of clue, and indeed my old 1970s Collins English dictionary lists it as such.

What’s more interesting is that clew derives from the middle English word for a ball of thread or twine.

In the Theseus and Ariadne myth, Ariadne, who has the hots for Theseus, gives Theseus a ball of twine so that when he goes into the maze like lair of the minotaur to confront and slay the beast he can find his way back so he can then marry her. Theseus, being a bit of a shit, then abandons her to die on Naxos.

The story of Theseus and Ariadne was quite well known in medieval times where it was framed as a story of courtly love, sacrifice and betrayal, with the ball of twine as a key part of the story.

And so clew as well as a ball of twine, becomes the name for something that will lead you to the solution to a problem, in short, a clue…