The Butler Did It. Or Did He…….?

Having just returned from a week’s holiday, I’ve just finished reading a few books, a pastime which for me greatly increases the delicious escapism of a week away from the real world. As usual, I chose to read some hitherto unread books by Agatha Christie, just as I’ve been doing during all our holidays over the past two or three years. I hardly ever read at home as there always seems to be something else to be getting on with, and I find it very difficult to relax and really get into a book (in fact the same applies to my attempts so far to write one). But on holiday everything else is left behind, and I find reading a wonderful way to relax.

A lot of people seem to scorn Christie’s work because it’s either ‘too commercial’ or ‘not high-brow literature’, but I find it difficult to agree with these sentiments, not only from my own point of view and enjoyment of her books but also from the staggering statistics of her published work. She’s basically the most published author in history, outsold only by The Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and over a billion copies collectively in over 45 other languages. Whilst I accept that sheer volume doesn’t necessarily equate to quality, when we’re talking about these sorts of figures there has to be something special about the author.

I’m sure everyone knows the genre in which Christie wrote - that of murder mysteries – whether they’ve read any of her work or not, but it the sheer ingenuity of her stories which makes no two of her 70-odd books the same in terms of plot, character motivation and eventual revelation of ‘whodunit’. Any of you who haven’t read any Agatha Christie will be unaware of quite how intricate and complex each of her books are, but she manages to make every one sufficiently clever and intriguing without making them very hard going. A particular trait of mine with regards to literature is that I find it very difficult to get into some books for one reason or another. For example, I’ve been struggling to read Mila 18 by Leon Urich (a story of the Jews’ struggle in Poland during WWII) for about a year and still haven’t managed to get past the first few chapters. It’s not that it’s badly written or uninteresting, but its construction - or at least the way I’ve been interpreting it - is what I would describe as ‘wading through treacle’.

Christie’s books however, are right at the other end of the literary spectrum in terms of how they are written. Plot elements are there from the first page and soon start to progress, snowball, intertwine and develop almost immediately. The story twists and turns as the chapters progress yet it’s still incredibly easy to read – at least it is for me. The delicious ingenuity of her plots is nothing less than incredible, right up until the last minute when you just think you’ve worked it out but then the finger suddenly points to someone else and the cunning and convoluted motive is revealed. I think part of the appeal of Christie’s work – and again this also goes some way in making her books easy to read – is that she doesn’t write huge swathes of character description within the narrative. Instead she manages to describe each character’s physical attributes in a way which also tells us what sort of person they are. For example, she could describe someone as having ‘intelligent eyes’ or perhaps a ‘determined chin’, or even a ‘no-nonsense and business-like demeanour’. I’m no expert on literature in general and as I say, I don’t read a lot so have very little experience of how other authors work so I don’t know if Christie’s approach is unique, but this aspect of her writing really does seem a very clever and subtle way of establishing character traits without creating pages of long-winded description.

Something else I love about reading Christie’s work is the world in which she sets her stories. Now undoubtedly, it is a world of horrific murder in all its gruesome forms, but outside of that it’s always the idyllic English world of a semi-fictional bygone era, where nobody (or the main characters at least) seems to have a job as such; they all have ‘an income’ provided by some wealthy relative or other such benefactor who has kindly offered to see them through life financially. Everyone has a butler, or a manservant, a housemaid, a cook or a gardener – and some people even have one of each. It’s a world in which brothers and sisters co-habit in country cottages, where few people own a car but often have to hire a Daimler for the day, where supermarkets have yet to obliterate local grocers, fishmongers and butchers, and where village tea-rooms are the centre for local gossip. Even when her stories are set overseas, an adapted version of this standard template can still be seen whether it’s the south of France, the Caribbean, Egypt or Iraq. For me, this is as much part of the enjoyment and escapism of reading Christie’s work as the ingenious plots themselves.

Agatha Christie’s two most famous characters are, of course, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Neither of them were just any old detective; in fact Miss Marple wasn’t a detective at all, she was merely a keen observer of human nature with a sharp eye and a knack for interpreting people’s behaviour, all fed by living in a quiet country village with every conceivable character present for her to learn from. Poirot, on the other hand, was a full-time sleuth of the highest order, a fact which he has no problem in reminding everyone (and himself) of at regular intervals, and his overt immodesty and demand for perfection makes him a joy to read regardless of his undoubted brilliance as a detective. Christie had such command of the art of writing that she could present her books from any perspective; sometimes in the first person, sometimes it’s through a third party such as Captain Hastings in the Poirot stories. In one particular book she writes the whole story from the perspective of one of the secondary characters, and it’s they who turn out to be the murderer – how devilishly ingenious is that?

I often wonder just how a person’s mind and imagination can ever produce such complex yet entertaining stories, and still be as prolific as Agatha Christie was whilst still making each of her books sufficiently unique and not at all repetitive. Ah, but if I knew that, perhaps I’d be a world famous author too?