Category Archives: writing
Little Grey Cells Tackle Agatha’s Christies Perennial Popularity
Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries is to crime what Romeo and Juliet is to lovers; her thrillers inspires admiration from criminals themselves. My ignorant companion of last night made some distinctly unappreciative sounds when he discovered what my ‘big find’ at the library yesterday was. Harrumph! was my returning noise, and so we watched The Blue Train, A&E version of the novel starring David Suchet. Soon he was chuckling at the detective Poirot’s vanity over his waxed moustache and throwing out (entirely wrong) guesses as to whodunit. The perennial popularity of Agatha Christie, the best-selling author of all time at over 2 billion books, stem from the ‘order and method’ she uses to construct her thrillers, the same ‘order and method of the little grey cells’ with which Poirot solves his cases.
Order and Method
Agatha Christie’s work is brilliant because its purely driven by plot. A whodunit is a suspenseful process of revealing facts, and with Poirot’s ‘order and method’ arranging them into a solution. The order and method of my little grey cells, as opposed to Poirot’s, are perhaps not so strong. In Christie’s work, nothing in the plot is superfluous to arriving at this denouement. Characters gradually expose themselves in connection to it, people knew each other through it, and closed situations such as the snowed-in manor house or blue train have the advantage of keeping the suspect pool focused but large.
This is not to say I disparage her characters because they are by-products of plot. She sketches individuality in a few quick strokes. Overall, her books capture post-WWII British society with the wounds of the past and the changing mores of the Jazz Age. But her characters are plausible without the reader being tempted into their interior lives. They are shallow books of circumstance and mere fun, but mere fun is a great thing and Christie writes them to perfection.
Christie quite rightly tends to keep the viewpoint to a limited 3rd person, so that we see what Poirot sees, but not what he thinks. This engages the reader to sleuth out the mystery too. The few novels that she has done from the point of view of a character has its pitfalls, as the reader automatically side with the protagonist. It feels like a gyp when something happens that the narrator leaves out.
Of course she’s popular: her whodunits perfect their type, and her detectives are delicious, whether it be the wax-moustached Belgian Hercule Poirot or the old village gossip Miss Marple.
But who is this woman?
The Queen of Crime was in many senses a steadfast, disciplined writer who produced mystery upon mystery rather than illegal activities. She remains something of an enigma herself. While the later part of her life found her happily married to an archaeologist- not Mr. Christie- and going on digs between buying new houses, there was a most curious case (more here) in her youth. The only odd incident in an interesting, but ordinary life.
She disappeared in 1926. Classically enough, without a trace. The police were at their wits end for 11 days. Then one day a reporter is in a hotel lobby in the country. He notices something odd about the woman sitting on the chair. “Mrs. Christie?” he asks. Mrs. Christie blinks, and says “Oh yes. I have no idea how I got here.” To the end of her life she claimed amnesia.
Book Review: The Subway
The Subway is an intriguing quasi-fictional appropriation of reality that all New Yorkers can identify with. The Subway contains the full sweep of humanity in its passengers, as they jostle or sit at safe distances or stare into the passing faces. This panorama of society contains the myriad human interactions that make up civilization, from shoving to giving up your seat to flirting.
Minute gestures of the passengers lead one to observations of humanity. For the protagonist is like Everyman of Pilgrim’s Progress. He goes about his quest to arrive at his destination, and struggles with the conflicts of finding his metro card, missing a train by a second, being crowded into a smelly homeless person; we see his personality revealed, and as people and especially as New Yorkers, we can identify with his quest.
Within The Subway, all the glories and incongruities of American democracy are present. From the homeless to the elite, at any hour of the day the vast swell of humanity is present in all its odors. All people in the hunt for seats have the equality that makes America great.
Who wrote this fascinating study of the human psyche and deployed his acute and pointed observations on human nature? Who depicted the possible scenarios that could happen among such a group of people? No one. This novel doesn’t exist.
How is it possible that no one has written this book yet? I can’t be the only New Yorker who on their endless commute sometimes wondered about their fellow passengers, about where they were going and why. Storytelling has its roots in such unparalleled access to people. People who are too immersed in their experiences to put up facades. The subway is humanity raw and uncensored.
Considering people’s (and my own behaviors) on the subway, I’m convinced it is a minefield of character and of situation that is integral to a great story.