When You Come for the Queen...
Some notes about Agatha Christie's books
Queen of Crime, not of commas
I had some random thoughts on Agatha Christie, as I reread some of her books and listened to audiobooks on my commute:
1. I had forgotten how funny she is, consistently. Things like making fun of herself and her writing through her stand-ins is cute. A friend I mentioned to suggested that this was a reason for her success.
2. The pre-WWII novels are often casually antisemitic, as is well known. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
3. I saw some person on the internet say that she wasn't a good writer. Obviously, there are a lot of idiotic opinions on the internet, and this is another one. Her characters are generally not quite three-dimensional, but her writing is great. That includes all the aspects needed for a detective novel (plotting, the ability to put in red herrings and real clues, etc.), but it also includes the simple mechanics of writing.
4. Why do British people in the novels call him "Monsieur Poirot"? Wouldn't they just call him "Mister Poirot"?
5. Reading the first books with Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot seem to make it clear that she didn't expect them to be series.
6. I believe I've read that Christie liked Miss Marple more than Poirot (and she makes fun of writing him quite a bit, through Ariadne Oliver), and to some extent, I feel like Miss Marple is indeed a higher level of what she did with Poirot. He's the armchair detective, as he notes, but there are some more active investigative moments from Poirot. Miss Marple tends to be even more inactive than Poirot (with police often featured in the active investigation chapters). Yet she still figures everything out.
7. It seems as though writing a Miss Marple story might be harder than a Poirot story, simply because you need to make the solution also conform to the "It reminded me of" technique of Miss Marple.
8. The commas in the printed Agatha Christie stories annoy me slightly. Commas after introductory phrases in a sentence are helpful for clarity when reading. A major offender in this regard is the sci-fi author Genre Wolfe, I've noticed, or his editor, but the editor on the Agatha Christie books seems to have similarly scorned such commas.
9. Her stories are sometimes gruesomely modern. The ABC Murders is a serial killer novel, kind of. There's a teen’s body burned in a car in The Body in the Library. These aren't hardboiled detective novels, but they aren't prim country house stuff, either.
10. I smiled when one of the characters in The Body in the Library says that he has autographs from a bunch of famous authors, including Agatha Christie.
Insane to see you write this, as I just finished my first ever Christie novel the other day and we’d not talked about it.
The latest editing of Murder of Roger Ackeroyd has her reflections on Poirot as a character — it does appear she did not initially like him, but grew more and more fond of him as the years went on.
3. People on the internet are generally wrong, of course. People don't realize how much of the mystery genre was invented by her. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express, just as two examples (because they're my favorites) were beyond revolutionary when she wrote them.
4. I think people were more polite about calling people by their foreign titles in those days, and it was probably also a form of posh bigotry--"I know you aren't from here."
5. That's an excellent point, which is also why she had to officially unretire him and then retire him again.
7. That's a very good point. Poirot usually has permission to be where he needs to be. Marple doesn't.
8. Someone we both know also scorns such commas. I'll leave it to you to figure out who I mean... ;-)
9. The Body in the Library in particular feels very modern for lots of reasons.
On a general note, I hope that you also listen to the BBC Radio dramatizations with John Moffat as Poirot and June Whitfield as Marple. They're fantastic.