The Ageless Agatha Christie
Page 27
Linda is not alone in thinking we should take Christie more seriously. Graham, 21, from Oxford, England, has come to learn that the pleasure Christie gives him is not the mark of a bad writer, but its opposite. Graham’s mother collected every Christie title and one day he picked up her copy of Cards on the Table. “Even though to this day I do not understand Bridge, which features so prominently, I found it an enjoyable read.” When Graham took his A-level exams at school, he wanted to write about Poirot and Hastings but was informed that “there wasn’t enough substance in an Agatha Christie to analyze.” Graham only stopped believing this at university when he wrote his dissertation, “a study of the way in which authors bid farewell with their ‘final’ works,” which ended up drawing on Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. “The excitement of everyone in the department finally laid those A-level demons to rest.” He fell in love with the book and the author. “Curtain … is a novel of contradictions…. It is a fitting ending for Poirot and Hastings … but it breaks all the rules.” Now, with Christie as an intellectual core, he is ready to face the world.
Anne, 51, lives in The Lizard, a village in Cornwall. She has been reading Agatha Christie for almost forty years. Her first book was The Hollow (Murder After Hours): “I was staying at an Aunt’s and bored stiff when I saw the book in her bookcase. I was attracted by the cover [which featured a] hedgehog and box of matches. I started to read and that was it–I was off to the library the following week and haven’t stopped reading and re-reading since then.” Anne collects the various paperback editions, and has an impressive collection of around two thousand. They belong in a purpose-built wall-to-wall and ceiling-to-floor bookcase.
I also collect as much memorabilia as I possibly can. I have attended the [International Agatha Christie Festival, in Torquay] for the last couple of years and really enjoy meeting up with other fans and talking all things Agatha…. Even though I disagree with the more recent TV adaptations it doesn’t stop me going location spotting whenever I can.
For Scott, in Melbourne, Australia, it is a question of “obsession” which “began as a youngster.” “Agatha Christie,” he explains, “quite literally changed my life.” And as a valued fan, he has met Christie’s family, attended the International Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay, England, four times, and even “been given the rare honor of a backstage tour of ‘The Mousetrap’—a thrilling experience, considering the monumental history!” Scott explains: “My home is decorated from cellar to attic with things I have collected, and I have let out my artistic side by creating tributes to my favorite books, little groupings of found objects featuring in the stories.” The Christie Estate voted him “Australia’s Biggest Agatha Christie Fan” in 2013, an honor he takes pride in. “What would my life be without Agatha Christie? I can’t help but think it would be extremely dull!”
Scott and Anne are not alone in collecting. Ralf, who lives in Nuenen, a village in the Netherlands, has devoted a huge amount of time to building up a library of Agatha Christie editions. The “Queen of Crime” library, which has a strong online presence, “contains over 5,700 books in fifty-five languages/dialects by and about Agatha Christie.” Fans, publishers and Agatha Christie Limited send him new books to add to the shelves, often in advance of publication. The aim is “to build up a library for future purposes, so authors, journalists, and theatre people can borrow [the] works.” The whole project is professional, but it is a labor of love. Ralf read his first Christie, A Murder Is Announced, at age eleven, while camping.
Jaclyn, from New York, started reading Christie for work, not pleasure: she was assigned And Then There Were None in eighth grade. “I was hooked.” Jaclyn travels to England every year to make the International Agatha Christie Festival, and to meet fellow admirers “who enjoy a challenging puzzle, a little romance and lots of (vicarious) drama, but without the gratuitous sex and violence that permeates some murder mysteries and thrillers.” Is there something specifically “English” about this alternative world; this world where tension, confusion and difficulties exist but in a sanitary, not sordid, way?
Jeff, “50 years young,” from California, San Diego, thinks so. He also started young, after reading Poirot’s obituary on the front page of the New York Times in 1975. “I stumbled across one of her books at a local second-hand bookshop—it was The Murder at the Vicarage, and even though my copy is falling apart, I still have it…. I took it home and read it voraciously—all in one sitting.” Soon he was “hitting used bookstores every few weeks,” but he quickly learned to slow down, “to savor the flavor” and even sometimes to work out “whodunit.” The one book he saved, for over two decades after buying it, was Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. When he made the pilgrimage to the United Kingdom for the International Agatha Christie Festival, Jeff “decided to reread all the Agathas again,” this time “in the order they were published” and culminating in Curtain. “Yes, I knew whodunit … but on this read-through I could slow down…. It turned into an appreciation of the author and her very real art.”
For Tito, 49, from São Paulo, Brazil, it all started with his aunt’s verbatim account of the spy thriller Destination Unknown. “The destination was really unknown,” he notes, because no one would have guessed that once he had read everything in translation he would fly to England to “research her documents,” “build a fantastic network of friends around the world” and eventually write two books: “one about Agatha Christie’s England and the other about her life and work.” This very English lady has given Tito a colorful, varied life.
Many of what Agatha Christie Limited has branded “superfans” have spoken about the joys of meeting and getting to know Tom Adams. It was Adams’ iconic cover art from the 1960s to 1980s that got many readers interested in Christie in the first place. Each eerie painting stands as a work of art in its own right, while also providing hawk-eyed readers with valuable clues to the books’ puzzle solutions. Scott, who has a website devoted to these images, states: “I own four of his original paintings and several limited-edition prints, something I never could have dreamt of! And better still, I now count Tom and his wife, Georgie as friends.”
Can fans solve the mystery of Agatha Christie’s appeal? Everyone has a different opinion. Graham gets animated on this topic:
I think the secret to Agatha Christie’s enduring success is her almost mercurial tendency for subversion. There is almost always some sort of trick to be played. … Christie sometimes gets pigeon-holed as a conservative, formulaic writer. But I think she is still widely read because you open her novels often expecting that, and then are confronted with something different altogether…
Tito has a completely different solution. “I think that in the trees of Ashfield [the young Agatha’s family home], there was a magical gate that she crossed.” She became “blessed with the power to tell stories like no others could do and she became a magical personality, attracting adoration for her work and herself forever.”
Scott notes that “her combination of the macabre and delightful characters is second-to-none. I’m probably more in love now than ever before.” Linda puts it down to Christie’s humanity: “she … provides a calm and comfortable world” peppered with people from “all walks of life”: “From Inch the taxi driver to Mr. Pye … from old spinsters to Lords of the Manors … from fastidious Belgian detectives to vicars, no one is excluded and everyone is welcome.” Jeff echoes Christie herself, as quoted in the introduction: from plots to settings to dialogue to character, “Christie’s books really had something for everyone…. That sausage machine worked gloriously until the end…. The stories seem fresh and even relevant.” But ultimately, he suggests, “that is for academics to argue.”
Note
1. Katherine Rushton, “Sorry, Poirot: Now There’s a Formula to Tell Us Whodunnit,” Daily Mail (August 3, 2015), p. 29; Steven Beattie, “Who Killed the Fun in Agatha Christie? (Spoiler: Academics), Quill and Quire (August 4, 2015), accessed August 4, 2015, www.quillandquire.com/authors/2
015/08/04/who-killed-the-fun-in-agatha-christies-novels-spoiler-academics.
Bibliography
Beattie, Steven. “Who Killed the Fun in Agatha Christie? (Spoiler: Academics).” Quill and Quire (August 4, 2015). www.quillandquire.com
Rushton, Katherine. “Sorry, Poirot: Now There’s A Formula to Tell Us Whodunnit.” Daily Mail (August 3, 2015), p. 29.
About the Contributors
Sarah Bernstein is a PhD candidate in the Department of English, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research focuses on post-war writing by women and its engagement with social sciences and the British Welfare state. Other research interests include representations of girlhood, detective fiction, the Frankfurt School, nature writing and ecocriticism.
J. C. Bernthal received a PhD from the University of Exeter, England. He works for the crime writer Sophie Hannah. His monograph, Queering Agatha Christie, is forthcoming with Palgrave. He has carried out research for the BBC and UKTV, with publications on Christie in Clues: A Journal of Detection (2014); Women: A Cultural Review (2015); and The Detective (ed. Barry Forshaw, Intellect, 2016).
Charlotte Beyer is a senior lecturer in English studies at the University of Gloucestershire, England. She has published widely on contemporary literature and genre, especially fiction. She is the co-editor of Mothers Without Their Children (Demeter Press, 2016) and editor of a special issue on contemporary crime fiction for the Journal of American, British and Canadian Studies (2017).
Meg Boulton is affiliated with the History of Art Department at the University of York, England, from which she received her AHRC-funded PhD. Her research focuses on the conceptualization of (sacred) space, and the importance of space and place in creating institutional identities. She is also a freelance lecturer at the University of York and the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education.
Brigitta Hudácskó is a PhD candidate and instructor at the University of Debrecen, Hungary, where she has taught on Sherlock Holmes adaptations. Her thesis is “Sherlock Holmes in the War on Terror: Crime Dramas Featuring the Character of the Great Detective.” Research interests include detective fiction, television studies and translation studies.
Michelle M. Kazmer is a professor in the School of Information, Florida State University. She conducts research in the area of distributed knowledge and applies theories from information science to detective fiction. Her research has been published in Library & Information Science Research (2013) and the Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology (2014).
Jilly Lippmann is a tutor in English literature and a doctoral candidate in the College of Arts, Society and Education at James Cook University, Australia. Her research focuses on the “New Woman” in late colonial modernity in mainstream print culture and Australian literature. She has also been a research assistant and a learning advisor and course facilitator for first-year bridging courses.
Merja Makinen is an associate professor in English literature at Middlesex University, England. She is the author of Agatha Christie: Life and Letters (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan); Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); the entry for Agatha Christie in the Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction (eds. Lee Horsley and Charles Rzepka, Blackwell, 2010); and an article in The Human (June 2015).
Rebecca Mills is an associate lecturer at Plymouth University, England. She completed her PhD thesis, “Post-World War II Elegy and the Geographic Imagination,” supported by the European Fund, at the University of Exeter. Research interests include elegy, detective fiction, modernism, literary geographies, the uncanny, the Gothic, rites of passage and death.
Sarah Street is a professor of film and the foundation chair of drama at the University of Bristol, England. She has published widely on British cinema, costume and cinema, European film set design and color film. Her book Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation, 1900–55 (BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) was awarded Best Monograph prize by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies.
List of Names and Terms
Adams, Tom
adaptation
Adorno, Theodor
“The Adventure of Johnny Waverley”
After the Funeral
Agatha
The Agatha Christie Hour
Agatha Christie’s Poirot
And Then There Were None
anti–Semitism
Apted, Michael
Astaire, Jarvis
At Bertram’s Hotel
Auriti, Marino
Austen, Jane
An Autobiography (memoir by AC)
Bachelard, Gaston
Baráth, Katalin
Bargainnier, Earl F.
Barnard, Robert
Bart, István
Barzun, Jacques
Bax, Arnold
Bellos, David
Beresford, Prudence “Tuppence” (fictional character)
Berger, John
the Bible
The Big Four
Birns, Margaret Boe
Birns, Nicholas
Bloom, Harold
Bode, Katherine
The Body in the Library
Boehmer, Elleke
Bowen, Elizabeth
Brady, Orla
Brief Encounter
Brown, Erica
Brownson, Charles
Buck, Michele
Burnett, Gary
“The Capture of Cerberus”
Cards on the Table
Carey, Peter
A Caribbean Mystery
Chan, Jackie
Chatman, Elfreda
childhood
Christie, Archie
Christie, Campbell
Christie, Julie
Clark, Jim
Cleopatra (Queen of Egypt)
Cole, Cathy
Conan Doyle, Arthur
Cook, Michael
Cox, Pamela
Crooked House
Csanády, Katalin
Curran, John
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
d’Alambert, Jean
Dalton, Timothy
Dead Man’s Folly
Death on the Nile
Derrida, Jacques
Destination Unknown
Detection Club
Doctor Who
Dömötör, Edit
“The Double Clue”
Eagleton, Terry
Eastman, Brian
Eco, Umberto
Edelman, Lee
Einstein, Albert
Eliot, T.S.
empire
enlightenment era
Evans, Mary
Evil Under the Sun
Exton, Clive
fandom
Farnham, Brian
Feldman, Phil
feminism
Fisher, Charlotte
Fisher, Phryne (fictional character)
Five Little Pigs
foreignness
forensic science
Foucault, Michel
“Four and Twenty Blackbirds”
4.50 from Paddington
Freud, Sigmund
Fry, Roger
Funerals Are Fatal
Gálvölgyi, Judit
Garbo, Greta
Giant’s Bread
Gildersleeve, Jessica
Giles, Judy
Gill, Gillian
Gioni, Massimiliano
golden age of detective fiction
Greenwood, Kerry
Gregory, Celia
Griffiths, Tom
Grover, Mary
Habermas, Jurgen
Hall, Stuart
Hallowe’en Party
Hammill, Faye
Hastings, Arthur (fictional character)
Hawkes, Gail
Helen of Troy
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
heredity
heteronormativity
Hickory Dickory Death
Hickory Dickory Dock
&nbs
p; Hicks, Rosalind
Hoffmann, Dustin
The Hollow
“The Hollow” (play)
Holmes, Sherlock (fictional character)
Holst, Gustav
homosexuality
Horkheimer, Max
Horowitz, Anthony
“How Does Your Garden Grow?”
Humble, Nicola
information behavior
Jackson, Philip
Jaeger, Paul
Joyce, James
Keating, H.R.F.
Knepper, Marty S.
Knepper, Paul
Knight, Stephen
Kondor, Vilmos
Kuttainen, Victoria
“The Labors of Hercules” (TV episode)
Lawrence, D.H.
Lawson, Alan
Leavis, Q.D.
Lee, Bruce
Lemon, Felicity (fictional character)
Light, Alison
Linda
Lord Edgware Dies
Losey, Gavrik
Makinen, Merja
Malleus Maleficarum
Mallowan, Max
Malouf, David
The Man in the Brown Suit
Mansfield, Katherine
Markham, Kika
Maróti, Andor
Marple Jane (fictional character)
Marshall, Andrew
Mary I (Queen of Scotland)
Mauriès, Patrick
McQueen, Steve
mental illness
Meyerhold, Vsevolod
middlebrowism
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
modernism
modernity
Moers, Ellen
Moore, Sarah H. E,
Moran, Pauline
Morse, Helen
“The Mousetrap”