Hercule Poirot entered loudly dismissing all the old familiar tropes, proudly declaring that it was not for him, this Holmesian propensity for scrambling around in the dirt collecting cigarette ash and bits of burnt letter instead the work was done by the little gray cells. The genre was popular long before she took a stab at it with “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” (which sat in the publisher’s office for five years before it was accepted for a pittance and published in the early 1920s), but it was much more hidebound. Not that there are many mystery writers who don’t owe Christie something.
During her marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan, she spent as much time working on various excavations as she did writing novels, which not only inspired several of her novels (including the ancient Egyptian “Death Comes as the End”), it makes her a double-shot inspiration for Elizabeth Peters’ popular archaeologist detective, Amelia Peabody. Yes, she admits that even as a child she was telling stories to the kittens in the garden, but her work was her work and just one of the things that made up her life, which survived two world wars, two marriages and an unprecedented career in a way that can be described only as globe-trotting. Capturing the experience of a generation too often made over-grim or over-glorious, it is the autobiography of a woman, not merely a writer. Her life story “Agatha Christie: An Autobiography” (Harper, $29.99), which has just been rereleased with a new foreword by her grandson, is similarly brisk and admirable, although at 532 pages, it is quite the longest work she wrote. She believed in storytelling and did not confuse it with decanting the contents of her interior life and stretching it out along a contrived plot tarted up with simile, symbolism and encyclopedic information about secret societies (although she did love a good secret society now and then, ditto the occasional plot to secure world domination). 27 Arts & Books section, an article on Agatha Christie referred to the author as Dame Christie. With deft and cheerful economy, she can conjure a character in three sentences, set an intricate plot moving in five and plumb the depths of the human soul using snatches of overheard conversation and a bottle of hat paint. And for anyone trying to write to be widely read, it’s hard to beat Dame Christie.
I read lots of other books as well, but I don’t like to go too long between Agatha Christies because, as a writer myself, I don’t like to stray too far from the masters. I don’t own all of the 66 mystery novels and 14 short-story collections that Christie wrote, but I have most of them and I read them over and over again, in rotation, throughout the year. Now it resides beside its sisters in my Agatha box, a wooden crate at the foot of my bed. I promised myself I would take my time, savor the experience and read only a few pages at a time. Clutching it tightly as if someone might snatch it from me, I quickly bought it. Anyone monitoring my vital signs would have thought I had discovered the next Gnostic gospel or a lost play of Shakespeare’s. Last summer, while browsing in a used bookstore in San Luis Obispo, I discovered something I thought no longer existed - an Agatha Christie novel I had not read.
0 kommentar(er)
