Literary critic Edmund Wilson posed just this question in a 1945 edition of New Yorker magazine. He was being disingenuous. He didn’t care one jot for Agatha Christie’s wildly successful detective fiction and was irritated that so many did. The last laugh is with Agatha. Forty-seven years after her death she remains one of the best-selling authors of all time. Adaptations of her work continue to grace our theatres, airwaves, televisions and cinemas, not least Kenneth Branagh’s Hercules Poirot mystery, “A Haunting in Venice” which will be released in September.
Given the undoubted popularity of Christie’s creations, it might seem perverse of me to raise Wilson’s question again. But I feel there is still scope for a serious discussion of Christie not just as a superlative constructor of complex plots, but as a chronicler of her times. Writing between 1921 and 1976, Christie was in many ways a mirror of the contemporary mores of her mass market audience, predominantly in the UK. But as her fame grew – and, with it, her ability to travel – her audience reached further afield.
In her works, we read the changing place of working women in society, the traumas of two wars, the Great Depression, changes in technology, tourism and fashion, and perhaps most profoundly, changes in how people casually referred to other races. Furthermore, she tells a lot about which authors were fashionable at the time, and as she became more confident in her craft, she gave us a window into that craft, and interactions with what we would now call “fandom.”
I started re-reading her detective novels, in order, at the start of the year, and have just finished the twenty-first, “Cards on the Table,” originally published in 1937. Here are some of my observations thus far.
The novels of the 1920s are very much those of an author trying to find her voice and mimicking the successful authors of her time. Many of her crime-capers, such as “The Secret of Chimneys,” “The Seven Dials Mystery,” or “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” have a sort of PG Wodehouse comic effect, not least the characters of Bundle Brent and Henry Bassington-Ffrench. However, Christie soon tires of this sort of pastiche, and settles into a more straightforward style by the 1930s.
Another early influence is Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle. In the early Hercules Poirot novels, she is very much playing with genre norms he created. Just as Sherlock Holmes has his amanuensis Dr Watson, Poirot has his Captain Hastings. But Christie soon tires of being constrained by the first-person diary style of narration and gets rid of Captain Hastings, despite his public popularity. She ships him off to Argentina and only reluctantly brings him back after the Stock Market Crash. But he is soon replaced by characters such as Colonel Race and the author Ariadne Oliver, both of whom Poirot respects intellectually. This allows us to see a kinder more reflective side of Poirot rather than has habitual mockery of Hastings. I often wonder how Christie would have reacted to the rather intellectually-challenged sidekick being present in practically every one of the David Suchet ITV Poirot dramas.
Another rejection of Conan-Doyle comes even earlier: Christie very quickly rejects the “physical clue” style of detection. Accordingly, Poirot mocks his French counterpart in “Murder on the Links” and makes much of a clue of a piece of pipe. Not for him, crawling around on his hands and knees looking for a certain unique variety of cigarette ash. Rather, Poirot will detect using his “little grey cells” and psychological assessment. However, this means that we should be all the more focussed when a physical clue is presented, and especially when Christie takes the trouble to draw us a map or show us a letter (both of which occur in her first Mrs Marple novel “Murder at the Vicarage”). For those of us who still know how to play bridge, play close attention to the bridge scores in “Cards on the Table.”
