Article for Happy at Home
Agatha Christie always gives me a feeling of holiday - summer on the beach, Christmas in an armchair with tea and cake - I suppose it’s because that’s where and when I first came across her. My family read a lot, and indiscriminately, so there were always piles of books lying around for me to try out and there were always Agatha Christies I hadn’t read. I now know you can read them anywhere, but those are the place she takes me back to.
No author of detective stories has been so successful as Agatha Christie. Her name has become a byword for a particular approach to crime writing - a closed setting, any sex and violence take place out of the reader’s sight, the unexpected detective - pompous ridiculous Poirot, the underestimated and overlooked Miss Marple, - the denouement in the library with all the suspects gathered round bemused until the sleuth tugs away at one unremarkable thread until the smoke screens and false trails unravel and the truth of what happened is plain to see.
It all began with a challenge from Agatha’s sister Madge - could she write a ‘fair’ detective story which kept the reader guessing even though they were given just as much information as the detective. Agatha won the bet and so have countless readers since then.
There has been no more successful crime writer than Agatha Christie; there has been no one better at doing what she did. She marries plot and pace, human understanding and quirky characterisation, fairness to her readers with sleight of hand uniquely well.
How did she do it? She drew on her experience - born into a well off middle class family in Torquay, but never so well off that they were without financial anxiety. Two marriages, one unhappy though it gave her a child and one long and happy. A well publicised disappearance, amnesia - a break down she didn’t talk about. She drew from all that had happened to her, that made her who she was.
But beyond that there is an indefinable something more that draws you in and keeps you turning the pages. If you haven’t read one of her stories why not begin where she did with ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’. You’ll be introduced to Hercule Poirot and get your first chance to match your wits against his. It will seem incredible - she is very readable - but ‘Styles’ was published a hundred years ago; to read it is to open a time capsule. Set towards the end of the first world war this is a world where houses were commonly lit by gaslight and candles, where the house is having to make do with three gardeners rather than the five they had before the war and where Belgian refugees (one of them Poirot) from the fighting have made their way over the Channel. She writes about the world she lives in not a historic past and so she bears witness to what it felt like to live in this era.
This time between the wars is often called the ‘Golden Age of Crime Writing’ and Christie was soon recognised as one of its four Queens along with Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham. Sayers stopped writing detective fiction before the second war but the others continued though Christie was certainly the most prolific and successful of them.
Golden age is an artificial term used to describe a particular kind of detective story set in a world disturbed by violence that is brought back into balance when the murderer is discovered and faces justice. Sometimes caricatured as cosy they provided comfort and security to people who having lived through one great upheaval were already seeing the tensions that would lead to the next. ‘Cosy’ is certainly an unfair description of Christie. She is ruthless with her characters - not only might the killer be the last person you expected they might also turn out to be the last person you wanted to be guilty. Her various sleuths Poirot, Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence were able to see all too clearly the workings of the heart that would lead to someone to kill.
And she has certainly been an influence on future generations of writer who would be dissatisfied with soft soap - Val McDermid wrote ‘Christie is the gateway drug to crime fiction both for readers and writers…..just one book is never enough.’
So if you did start with ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ what could you go on to?
She said herself that her favourite of her books tended to shift but ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’, ‘A Murder is Announced’, ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ and ‘The Moving Finger’ were all books she enjoyed re reading and she thought ‘The Thirteen Problems’ was a good set of stories.
And if you enjoy her why not try some of her competitors - as well as Sayers, Marsh and Allingham (who was Christie’s own favourite writer) there are people like Josephine Tey, Edmund Crispin, Michael Innes and John Dickson Carr. When I read them I’ll be lying on a beach in Cornwall, but you can choose where they take you back to.
She wrote 66 detective novels, 14 short story collections, the Mousetrap (the world’s longest running play) as well as half a dozen novels as Mary Westmacott. She sold over a billion books in English and another billion in translation.
Which is not to mention countless tv series, film adaptations and radio plays…
