Agatha Christie Page 7

  There is no reliable data for consideration of Agatha Christie in the summer school or in adult education. It should be noted, however, that the Evelyn Wood Institute of Speed Reading does not lag behind other renowned institutions of learning. ‘Agatha Christie,’ declared a well-informed source, ‘is one of the few authors guaranteed to help students break the lip-moving habit.’

  But schooldays are the least of it. Agatha Christie is part and parcel of real life in the US, in sickness and in health, in good times and bad. Two million Americans are currently in health-related institutions. At any given moment of the day it is safe to say that half of them are either having their temperature taken or reading an Agatha Christie. The librarian at a veterans’ hospital in the Midwest reports her 384 assorted Christies wear out faster than they can be replaced. The bookstore of a prominent New England teaching hospital stocks a hundred titles, of which forty-five are Christies – and always will be. At Boston’s famous Lying-In Hospital it would be an adventurous friend who appeared during visiting hours bearing anything but an Agatha Christie. Mothers of twins probably expect two.

  In the long twilight of life as well, our 22,431,000 senior citizens lean heavily on Agatha Christie. For the elderly confined to nursing and convalescent homes, she is more than a prop. She is a necessity. Says the specialist charged with bookmobile deliveries in the Denver area: ‘I put Agatha Christie right up there with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in making old age tolerable.’

  Even before the golden years, Agatha Christie comforts the unfortunate. In every year, Talking Books for the Blind puts thirteen to fifteen Agatha Christies on tapes and records. And far outnumbering the visually handicapped are the four million Americans in jail. The convict librarian at a major Federal Correctional Facility in California says: ‘She’s the perfect escape reading. The only trouble is keeping her on the shelves. You can’t trust some of these guys.’

  And what about that beleaguered band that has finished school, stayed out of jail, and not yet signed up for early retirement? Do they seize on the shrinking prime of life as a respite from the endless reading and rereading of eighty-five novels? In a sense, they do. They turn to amateur theatricals or the problems of the world. But ask a bookie for odds on the Christmas presentation of any suburban dramatic group, and he will offer you three to two that it is either Witness for the Prosecution or The Mousetrap. The New Republic has reconsidered Dame Agatha for serious thinkers.

  Age and state of pupillage may affect how one takes Agatha Christie – neat or with a chaser – but not, apparently, personal finances. Belt tightening is now the rage and has made a mockery of Detroit’s catchy little jingle: ‘We like baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolets.’ Sports attendance is plummeting, hot dogs are selling at the price of steak, and automobile sales do not bear examination. Apple pie and Agatha Christie remain American favourites, durable and recession-proof. Nor is this the first time. In 1931, when banks were collapsing all over the country, Good Housekeeping ran its first article on Mrs Christie. In the hard years that followed, mounting unemployment, farm gluts and the flooding of the Mississippi River did not keep the Saturday Review of Literature, the Saturday Evening Post and Time magazine from following suit. Time, in fact, has paid Agatha Christie serious attention during every phase of the business cycle since, including turning points. At first glance it would appear that Dame Agatha sails serenely above the claims of prosperity or depression. But at this very moment some technician is probably correlating variations in Christie sales with fluctuations in the Dow-Jones index. And if a new economic indicator were to be born, ready to take its place with the Gross National Product and the rate of inflation, it would be a fitting memorial to the magnitude of the Agatha Christie triumph in the United States.

  Measurement of a phenomenon, however, is one thing, and explanation is another. Why do Americans gulp down Agatha Christie in such quantity? Our most eminent literary critics have asked the question with genuine and growing bewilderment. Their pardonable zeal to espy a new Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky blinds them to the essence of Gutenberg’s invention. They fail to recognize that, ever since the availability of the printing press, mankind has been evincing a dogged determination to read. And Americans, as usual, have taken a simple human desire and run away with it. Shakespeare and Defoe travelled west to the frontier in covered wagons. Sir Walter Scott gave birth to the mythology of the Old South. After fourteen hours a day at the spindles, mill girls in the Merrimack Valley swooned over Charles Dickens.

  Now genius is just as rare in literature as it is every place else. The world has long accepted the fact that the lack of a Wren or a Bulfinch has never prevented people from erecting buildings. Instead they have settled for the nearest reliable craftsman, and left subsequent generations to discover the aesthetic excellence of the stone cottages in the Cotswolds and the wooden farmhouses of Vermont.

  In the same sense, Agatha Christie has become a vernacular art form in her own right. And there is no doubt at all about the nature of her functionalism. She writes a readable book, a book that remains readable come hell or high water. This in itself is enough to explain her sales in the US, in the world.

  American enthusiasts of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf do not see it this way. An embattled crew – as they have to be – they fight every inch of the way. Very well, they concede grudgingly, Agatha Christie is an honest, reliable craftsman. What’s so wonderful about that? Surely there are plenty of them around. What makes this one so attractive to the American reading public?

  In some circles it is tactless to reply that readable writers are not really thick on the ground. Provocative, insightful, gritty… yes. Readable… no. Narrative thrust, as we must all admit, is hopelessly old-fashioned. But then, so are most book readers, at least in this country. Coteries may be interested in the psyche; people still like stories. Agatha Christie is, par excellence, a story-teller.

  Fortunately the second reason is less invidious. By making her works so quintessentially English, by becoming a chronicler of British small beer, Christie creates a special dimension of interest for her foreign audience, including Americans. Her intricate embroidery of domestic trivia obscures some of her consistent defects, such as shallow characterization and hackneyed situations. At the same time it leaves untouched her great strengths – the absolute mastery of puzzle, the glinting edge of humour, the accurate social eye. There are millions of us ready to attest that this is a more than satisfactory trade-off.

  A chorus of unanimity rises on at least one of these points. Friend and foe alike bow to the queen of the puzzle. Every Christie plot resolution has been hailed as a masterpiece of sleight-of-hand; she herself as a virtuoso of subterfuge. Tributes like these are heartwarming and deserved. They are not, however, altogether accurate. Agatha Christie’s brilliance lies in her rare appreciation of the Laocoon complexities inherent in any standard situation. She herself rarely condescends to misdirect; she lets the cliché do it for her. When a sexually carnivorous young woman appears on the Christie scene, the reader, recognizing the stock figure of the home wrecker, needs no further inducement to trip down the garden path of self-deception. Wilfully misinterpreting every wrinkle, he will have strayed so far into the brambles by the time of the inevitable murder that nothing can get him back on course. Then the solution, the keystone of which is simply the durability of the original marriage or attachment, comes as a startling bouleversement for him – not to mention the carnivore. The contrapuntal variations on this theme are explored in Evil Under the Sun, Murder in Retrospect (in Britain Five Little Pigs), and Death on the Nile.

  The same deadly common sense informs the Christie approach to impersonation and collusion. After all, any mystery aficionado worth his salt knows how to react when a large fortune and several dubious claimants are trailed enticingly before him. Like Pavlov’s dog, he’s been there before. Then comes the grand finale, the bland Christie assumption that, if an inheritance is worth shenanigans now, it was
worth even more one death back. Therefore – good heavens! – the impostor is not any of those obvious suspects but is the man, or woman, who is already enjoying full possession of the money bags. So runs the logic of A Murder Is Announced, There Is a Tide (Taken at the Flood in Britain), and Dead Man’s Folly. The twist is then reversed for Funerals Are Fatal (After the Funeral), where the skulduggery begins one death later, instead of one death sooner, than expected.

  This Christie penchant for exhaustive combinations and permutations really blossoms whenever two people conspire to commit a crime. Outlandish yokings of every description abound. But, by and large, it is safe to say that whenever an obvious male ne’er-do-well exists, no woman is ineligible to be his accomplice. In this respect Dame Agatha showed her colours as early as The Mysterious Affair at Styles, where the gruff, middle-aged companion, complete with tweeds and walking shoes, emerges as a passionate partner in murder. From these promising beginnings she has made a clean sweep of the field, including the devoted secretary (Sparkling Cyanide), the protective Swedish child lover (Ordeal by Innocence), the subnormal housemaid (A Pocket Full of Rye), and the crisply independent poor relation (The Patriotic Murders, in Britain One, Two, Buckle My Shoe). Yet for a ruthless exploiter of every conceivable possibility, these achievements were not enough. The apotheosis of Christie conspiracy is reserved for Murder in the Calais Coach, otherwise the Orient Express, where everybody is guilty.

  All of this lies well within the canon of the classic detective story and is deeply satisfying to those of us who like to see a rigid form explored to its outermost limits. But inevitably the further Agatha Christie wanders off the beaten track, the closer she comes to overshooting the bounds of credulity. Here is where her export market enjoys a clear-cut advantage. An English reader may boggle at palpable absurdities. Not so an American. By the time we have absorbed the larger realities of English life, together with the special aspects illustrated by St Mary Mead, we are not going to strain at gnats. For example, there is the geography of England. To American eyes, this involves an incredible number of people in a very constricted space. What’s more, instead of trying to spread out, they all seem to be going to London constantly. They go there to see their solicitors, to visit their dentists, to scour the white sales. What is wrong, asks the bemused American, with the dentists of Kilchester? Is there something about the pillowcases of Wolverhampton that we do not know?

  Similarly, any real estate transaction poses pitfalls for New World innocents. What exactly are these orders to view? Why is the role of the real estate so ambiguous? Who pays the rates and, God help us, are they serious about dilapidations?

  The vexatious topic of class and caste naturally remains perplexing. We Americans understand well-bred ladies in the garden and perfect gentlemen at their clubs. We are even willing to take an occasional rustic on faith. But the terra incognita between the two remains baffling. What do holidays camps, lipsticks from Woolworths, and family fortunes deriving from patent medicines really mean? Why are chemists, in any of their guises, automatically untrustworthy?

  And there is the eternal question of age. Who counts as young, who counts as old? Above all, when do people retire? Every American, assiduously working his way through the Christie oeuvre, can grasp the broad outlines of employment in the colonial civil services. But what is he to make of all those fifty-year-old men, coming home to marry and start families as country gentlemen of leisure? Certainly no subsequent plot-induced vagary of behaviour is going to seem bizarre after this initial monstrous aberration.

  Which raises the ultimate mystification. What in the world do these people do, day in, day out? The men, including the ex-Empire-builders, are equipped with studies to which they regularly retire. For what purpose is never made clear. The ladies, lamenting the loss of pre-war domestic staffs, are all sustained by chars, foreign helps and village girls. They are certainly not pushing a vacuum cleaner around. As for children, apparently they pack their bags for school as soon as they can walk.

  Even before he stumbles over a body in the library, the American reader realizes that he lacks the proper yardstick to measure normal English behaviour. What if the impersonation in A Murder Is Announced conjures up a hundred unexamined practical problems? It takes place in a community where no single middle-class householder seems to work for a living. Perhaps, in the ambiance of Chipping Cleghorn, practical problems automatically vanish. In Dead Man’s Folly it might seem at first blush unnatural that an army deserter, simply by growing his beard and changing his name, could return to the home of his ancestors and escape recognition. But the neighbouring gentry are so busy snubbing the upstart that it may be safe to assume that they never take a good look at him. Then there is the marriage between Alistair Blunt and the world’s greatest heiress in The Patriotic Murders. Why was there no press coverage to reveal its bigamous nature immediately? Here the explanation leaps to the mind trained by Agatha Christie. Alistair Blunt is a modest unassuming English gentleman who single-handedly controls the British government and world finance. If he can manage all that, he is certainly equal to the task of suppressing a few wedding pictures.

  The list could continue indefinitely, but the moral is self-evident. To read Agatha Christie, an American is required to abandon all his own social experience and surrender himself to a never-never world where voices are rarely raised, where breeding is more important than money, and where a really good herbaceous border matters more than anything else. In this climate the fanciful becomes the natural, and who cares what all these people do? When we meet them, their time is fully occupied answering police questions, manufacturing false evidence, and suspecting their nearest and dearest.

  If the lulling background is English, the humour is universal – at least in the vintage Christie, which can be defined roughly as running from the mid thirties through the end of the fifties. At the beginning of her career she strayed into broad set-pieces, with Bundle Brent rocketing adorably around the countryside and Hastings functioning as all-purpose stooge. But with success came relaxation and the introduction of fleeting vignettes and brief asides reflecting the author’s point of view. Taken as a whole, they constitute an irresistible interpretation of the human condition. Contemplate Poirot, dropping everything to fly to the assistance of a man unjustly convicted of murder. Throughout Mrs McGinty’s Dead he discovers the object of his solicitude to be about as unappetizing a specimen of humanity as could exist this side of villainy. ‘Unfortunately the more Bentley annoyed him, the more he came round to Spence’s way of thinking. He found it more and more difficult to envisage Bentley’s murdering anybody. James Bentley’s attitude to murder would have been, Poirot felt sure, that it wouldn’t be much good anyway.’

  That is a very neat encapsulation of a certain kind of depressing personality and the all-too-common fate awaiting a Good Samaritan.

  Then there are the two elderly women comparing appearance in Murder With Mirrors (They Do It With Mirrors). Miss Marple is undisguisedly white-haired, wrinkled and superannuated. Her American contemporary is much-dyed, much-corseted, much-dieted. But in a moment of clear-eyed vision, it is the American who ruefully admits: ‘ “Wonderful how that old hag keeps her figure.” That’s what they say of me. But they know I’m an old hag all right!’ Because every woman, short of the mental defectives, knows that age cannot be hidden, it can only be made more palatable.

  They Came to Baghdad features a young man growing gloomier and gloomier as he describes the exalted cultural goals of his employment. In Hickory, Dickory, Death (or Dock in England) we watch a young woman conscientiously simulate an interesting neurosis in a desperate attempt to engage the attention of the young psychologist she fancies. In So Many Steps to Death (in Britain Destination Unknown) there is the splendid scene in which a would-be suicide is interrupted in flagrante delicto by a courteous representative of British Intelligence inquiring if she might not prefer a more sporting death. These incomparable moments are not essential to Agatha Christ
ie’s plots. They are simply her commentaries on youth, age, self-pity and courtship. Like her observations on spoiled children, village newspapers and curious neighbours, they are as meaningful in New York – and Helsinki and Tokyo – as they are in London.

  For extra measure, the Christie assemblage includes a gallery of bystanders who transcend minor considerations of reality, creatures of inspired fantasy. These amiable jeux d’esprit, who can well be incorporated under the title of The Crazy Ladies, rarely figure as prominent members of the cast. But they are forever memorable. There is the mother in Cat Among the Pigeons who likes to spend her time riding around Anatolia in local buses. There is Miss Lemon, the perfect secretary, dedicated to the perfect filing system. There is Mrs Summerhayes, raising domestic incompetence to unimagined heights. And finally there are the happy interludes when the celebrated authoress takes a long cool look at the craziest lady of them all, that celebrated authoress, Mrs Ariadne Oliver.

  No, Agatha Christie is not a comic writer. Black humour, mordant wit, condescending irony are – thank God – alien to her native genius. She is the author of straightforward light fiction who uses humour as leavening so that, throughout her great period, everything she wrote breathes a spirit of sanity, kindliness and detachment. It is quite enough to endear her to millions of readers.

  And then, while their guard is down, she tells them more about what has happened to England since the First World War than The Times – either of London or New York. That quick and unerring eye for the homely detail is worth volumes of social history. In Styles we start out with servants, with open fires, with bedroom candles. Little by little, the servants fade away, electric lights reach the bedroom, and central heating warms good and bad alike. No one, including The Economist, has tracked the shift of English household practice from labour-intensive to capital-intensive with such unobtrusive persistency.