There are essentially two categories of books (or fiction if you will) — those that are read by an elite section of the society and those books that are so frequently read, that they’re rendered bleary and dog-eared.
Agatha Christie’s novels belong to the second, perhaps less-prestigious, category. But much-loved, nonetheless. Like countless other people my age, I too discovered Christie in my somewhat big school library, with its musty undertones, closed windows and shelf-lined walls, complete with a strict disciplinarian for a librarian. My memory fails when I try to recall the exact age at which I set my hands upon an Agatha Christie (it was a Miss Marple mystery) — as an angsty teenager, I faulted the book for putting me in a mood, far worse than I started with. At once, I took a distaste to Christie’s mysteries, judging all her books by one which, if I think about it now, was hasty on my part. A few months later, having missed half-a-class close to lunch, I walked to the library to check out new additions. A copy of Murder On The Orient Express was placed upside down on one of the tables: the cover had a picture of a solitary night lamp overlooking a desolate window; it spoke nothing of murder — there was no bloody knife, no gun lay about — in short, there was no eerieness about it. I borrowed the same copy and returned it the very next day. Hercule Poirot had won me over; Christie had won me over.
Unfortunately, over the years, Christie has been subjected to much reassessment, harsh and undue criticism, and is considered a second-rate mystery writer by discerning detective fiction specialists. It makes you wonder, ‘was she really the world’s favourite?’ Of course, there are other masters at spinning crime stories, the most obvious among them being Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and Edgar Allan Poe. In his 1950 essay, The Simple Art of Murder , Chandler, in fact, derides Christie for writing murders that were unrealistic. He writes that a Hercule Poirot mystery is “guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a half-wit could guess it.” But, in spite of all the condescension she faced, the honour of the best-selling novelist of all time goes to Christie. Her murder-mystery play, The Mousetrap , is the world’s longest-running play; it opened in the West End in London in 1952, and surpassed 25,000 performances in 2012.
With Hercule Poirot — his egg-shaped head, waxed moustache, impeccably-maintained, patent leather shoes and little grey cells — Christie perfected the art of a good plot, and trivial details that most writers prefer to overlook; be it a carefully overthrown jacket or false teeth in a glass of water, all of which are quite necessary to the crime, even if they may seem inconsequential at the time of discovery. What made him the perfect detective, the perfect human being even, was that as meticulous as he was, Poirot also came across as a caricature with his charming French phrases (“jolie femme”, “mon cher”, “Précisément!”). Incidentally, Talk like a Poirot Day is on September 20, and what better excuse does one need to practise their Belgian-accented French? But by 1960, Christie grew tired of her “egocentric creep” of a male detective, although readers had grown fond of the high-maintenance Poirot — he was the only fictional character to have an obituary in The New York Times .
With Miss Marple, Christie quietly put an end to what we now call ‘mansplaining’. Marple relied more on women’s intuition, on the meaning behind relationships and her observation of society. Her lonely-woman image didn’t deter Marple, instead Christie used the stereotype to full effect. As a spinster, Marple’s invisible position in the Victorian Era (her views were often evil as much as she was conservative) was the best to pick up clues.
At the end of the day, what’s a good crime novel all about? Building mystery. And Christie’s fictions are profoundly shaped in the nature of people and their behaviour — whether they were capable of murder or not. Human motivation for murder, she has reiterated through her books, should not be belittled. Like Poirot remarks in Third Girl , “Where there is murder, anything can happen.”
In Christie’s novels, poison claimed more victims (30 out of 66, according to Michael Gerald’s The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie ) than any other murder weapon; it was her most preferred method. Kathryn Harkup’s new book title A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie , sums it all up. A chemist and a Christie fangirl, Harkup observes that Christie used 14 different poisons, from the popular Arsenic and Cyanide to the lesser-known Monkshood and Ricin, which “was years ahead of her time” (Ricin’s current fame can be attributed to Walter White of Breaking Bad ).
One hundred and twenty five years ago, Dame Agatha Christie was born, and with her, an amazing array of brilliant plots. Her Syrian travel memoir based on her second husband Mallowan’s excavations in the 1930s, Come, Tell Me How You Live , might disappoint even her most ardent of fans — it has none of the preciseness of her other novels, the chronology is scattered and it reads like letters written to her sister or her daughter — yet, it makes a significant contribution to Middle East travels and marks the importance of human lives and their stories, apart from the sparkling details of Nimrud, Palmyra, of consuming hot tea and “flaps of Arab bread… with the blue Turkish hills to the north, and all around tiny springing flowers of scarlet and yellow.” It provides an insight into some of her novels including Murder in Mesopotamia and Appointment with Death .
But I’ll conclude my argument here by borrowing some of Poirot’s lines, “having placed my solution before you, I have the honour to retire from the case...”
