“She doesn’t get as much credit as she should for excellent prose”
February 19, 2023 4:56 PM Subscribe
To date, [Agatha] Christie is outsold only by Shakespeare and the Bible. Beyond her vast body of work, her influence is apparent everywhere from Adrian Monk to Gosford Park. The latest crop of Christie homages is a testament to the writer’s enduring appeal, but also to the flexibility of the format she perfected. The whodunit has its tropes—the eccentric investigator, the isolated country estate—while acting as a vehicle for whatever social commentary, colorful characters, or cultural references its current steward wants to infuse it with. from The Everlasting Appeal of Agatha Christie [The Ringer]
CW: may contain spoilers for "You"
CW: may contain spoilers for "You"
No doubt, Agatha Christie helped me become a reader as a kid, and for that I'm quite grateful.
posted by coffeecat at 6:06 PM on February 19, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by coffeecat at 6:06 PM on February 19, 2023 [7 favorites]
She absolutely can knock it out of the park when she wants to! Agatha's good works are my ideal reading for long plane trips, miserable weekends and sick days. There's enough colour and movement to keep me interested, but it doesn't matter if I have to read the same page three times or skip a bit, and it really doesn't matter if I've read them before. Comfortable, easy reading.
posted by andraste at 7:03 PM on February 19, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by andraste at 7:03 PM on February 19, 2023 [6 favorites]
Had not heard of You, but I’ll almost always stop for an article about a Christie-ssance. In the theme of Current Christie, I have really been enjoying the current spate of murder mysteries in isolated locales, often with some Gothic elements. The B&N I visit most often has a table with a sign reading “One of us is the killer,” though, so the wave may have crested…
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:57 AM on February 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:57 AM on February 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
I had really not been looking forward to the new season of You, fearing yet more repetition--it's a terrible show that thinks it's much, much smarter than it really is, about a terrible man who thinks he's much, much smarter than he really is. But if there's a mystery in it, I might reconsider!
But I think there's something weird going on in this piece. Check out this bit: "The specifics of the investigator become really endearing,” Green [writer of the new Branagh Poirot movies] observes. “That is much of the appeal to be with a Jessica Fletcher, to be with a Monk, to be with a Poirot—because we know their foibles, idiosyncrasies, and oddities that make them tick, make them interesting, make them funny, make them fussy.” In Green’s own Poirot films, starting with Murder on the Orient Express and continuing through Death on the Nile, the mechanics of Christie’s plots are left largely intact. It’s Poirot and the suspects he encounters who get extra embellishment..." If you've tried sitting through one of these wretched Branagh pictures, you know that it's the "extra embellishment" that makes them entirely unwatchable. To provide Poirot a backstory--to attempt to make him sympathetic--removes exactly the thing that makes him so sympathetic to us when we encounter him in the books: Here is this small, precise man obsessively straightening items on the mantel, refusing to tell you the thing he figured out six chapters ago, his mind itself a mystery to you, having his faculties be alternately praised or insulted depending on who is doing the talking. It's in Poirot's weird polite blankness, in the distance between the other characters' reactions to him, that our sympathies--our self-generated genuine sympathies, not our save-the-cat prompted ones--begin to form around him, and that we begin to care about this man with his egg-shaped head tilted slightly to the side.
The Branagh movies don't understand that at all, and so they take away that pleasure and replace it with dull, dull backstory. (At least, the first one, I guess? I had to give up on it.)
Lee Child says something interesting about his character, Jack Reacher, that I think applies to many of our favorite sleuths: “If you study English literature, you’re taught the character must change and go on a journey. I want very much the opposite [...] As a reader, I love series for the familiarity, so I’ve put effort into stopping Reacher from changing. That’s why people love series: it’s like putting on a comfortable old sweater, they know what they’re going to get.”
Now, I think something's going on a little deeper than comfy sweaters, obviously, or I wouldn't be making this long comment--I think those self-generated sympathies I mentioned function best over a pattern of repetition. If you read one Poirot, you don't have the same experience, you haven't built the same man with your personal hypotheses of his internal clockwork, that you would have if you'd read three or ten of the books. You do have to recognize the rhythms of the stories, the other characters' reaction to him, to have those feelings grow. He's very specifically not a dynamically-changing character in literature, and so your little gray cells do the dynamic work for him.
(This too--not to make this comment even longer--is why I think Glass Onion ultimately fails, because we want to spend time with our detective being a detective, making discoveries, and the movie would like to steal that from us by replacing an act of the mystery with a scheme!)
Ross MacDonald, who carved new territory out of the hard-boiled side of things with his Lew Archer, wrote a couple of essays in a chapbook On Crime Writing that I've been thinking about lately. He's talking about Poe, who invented all this stuff, and how Dupin functions as an illustration of Poe's need to put the chaotic world into rational order: "Dupin's reason masters the ape and explains the inexplicable [...] but not without leaving a residue of horror. The nightmare can't quite be explained away, and persists in the teeth of reason. An unstable balance between reason and more primitive human qualities is characteristic of the detective story. For both the writer and reader it is an imaginative arena where such conflicts can be worked out safely, under artistic controls."
We probably don't go around thinking of Agatha Christie as leaving a 'residue of horror' except that is one of its pleasures, isn't it? These people live in a world even more dangerous than our own--piles of strychnine, whole truckloads of it, just lying about, waiting for you to slight the wrong person and wind up dead.
(Well, if you're interested in this stuff, do seek out the MacDonald essays, because he also talks about another central pleasure of Christie's world, nostalgia for a privileged society, and how our hardboiled Americans were a violent reaction against the comforts of the country house.)
The piece in the FPP wants to try to elevate Christie: "For all her success, Christie still bears some of the stigma that faces most crime writing, which is seen more as disposable pulp than serious literature." I'm not sure who would say it that bluntly in this day and age, but of course they'd be wrong. To the extent that there is such a thing as serious literature, it has to mean more than "excellent prose." We have been talking about Christie and her books for one hundred years. If we understand literature to mean something more like a lasting relationship between a book and its audience, then surely we don't need to quibble about the quality of the sentences. The books are here, are still read today, have inspired millions of others, and so are what literature means. I think the piece would be better if it were able to admit that unapologetically.
posted by mittens at 4:49 AM on February 20, 2023 [42 favorites]
But I think there's something weird going on in this piece. Check out this bit: "The specifics of the investigator become really endearing,” Green [writer of the new Branagh Poirot movies] observes. “That is much of the appeal to be with a Jessica Fletcher, to be with a Monk, to be with a Poirot—because we know their foibles, idiosyncrasies, and oddities that make them tick, make them interesting, make them funny, make them fussy.” In Green’s own Poirot films, starting with Murder on the Orient Express and continuing through Death on the Nile, the mechanics of Christie’s plots are left largely intact. It’s Poirot and the suspects he encounters who get extra embellishment..." If you've tried sitting through one of these wretched Branagh pictures, you know that it's the "extra embellishment" that makes them entirely unwatchable. To provide Poirot a backstory--to attempt to make him sympathetic--removes exactly the thing that makes him so sympathetic to us when we encounter him in the books: Here is this small, precise man obsessively straightening items on the mantel, refusing to tell you the thing he figured out six chapters ago, his mind itself a mystery to you, having his faculties be alternately praised or insulted depending on who is doing the talking. It's in Poirot's weird polite blankness, in the distance between the other characters' reactions to him, that our sympathies--our self-generated genuine sympathies, not our save-the-cat prompted ones--begin to form around him, and that we begin to care about this man with his egg-shaped head tilted slightly to the side.
The Branagh movies don't understand that at all, and so they take away that pleasure and replace it with dull, dull backstory. (At least, the first one, I guess? I had to give up on it.)
Lee Child says something interesting about his character, Jack Reacher, that I think applies to many of our favorite sleuths: “If you study English literature, you’re taught the character must change and go on a journey. I want very much the opposite [...] As a reader, I love series for the familiarity, so I’ve put effort into stopping Reacher from changing. That’s why people love series: it’s like putting on a comfortable old sweater, they know what they’re going to get.”
Now, I think something's going on a little deeper than comfy sweaters, obviously, or I wouldn't be making this long comment--I think those self-generated sympathies I mentioned function best over a pattern of repetition. If you read one Poirot, you don't have the same experience, you haven't built the same man with your personal hypotheses of his internal clockwork, that you would have if you'd read three or ten of the books. You do have to recognize the rhythms of the stories, the other characters' reaction to him, to have those feelings grow. He's very specifically not a dynamically-changing character in literature, and so your little gray cells do the dynamic work for him.
(This too--not to make this comment even longer--is why I think Glass Onion ultimately fails, because we want to spend time with our detective being a detective, making discoveries, and the movie would like to steal that from us by replacing an act of the mystery with a scheme!)
Ross MacDonald, who carved new territory out of the hard-boiled side of things with his Lew Archer, wrote a couple of essays in a chapbook On Crime Writing that I've been thinking about lately. He's talking about Poe, who invented all this stuff, and how Dupin functions as an illustration of Poe's need to put the chaotic world into rational order: "Dupin's reason masters the ape and explains the inexplicable [...] but not without leaving a residue of horror. The nightmare can't quite be explained away, and persists in the teeth of reason. An unstable balance between reason and more primitive human qualities is characteristic of the detective story. For both the writer and reader it is an imaginative arena where such conflicts can be worked out safely, under artistic controls."
We probably don't go around thinking of Agatha Christie as leaving a 'residue of horror' except that is one of its pleasures, isn't it? These people live in a world even more dangerous than our own--piles of strychnine, whole truckloads of it, just lying about, waiting for you to slight the wrong person and wind up dead.
(Well, if you're interested in this stuff, do seek out the MacDonald essays, because he also talks about another central pleasure of Christie's world, nostalgia for a privileged society, and how our hardboiled Americans were a violent reaction against the comforts of the country house.)
The piece in the FPP wants to try to elevate Christie: "For all her success, Christie still bears some of the stigma that faces most crime writing, which is seen more as disposable pulp than serious literature." I'm not sure who would say it that bluntly in this day and age, but of course they'd be wrong. To the extent that there is such a thing as serious literature, it has to mean more than "excellent prose." We have been talking about Christie and her books for one hundred years. If we understand literature to mean something more like a lasting relationship between a book and its audience, then surely we don't need to quibble about the quality of the sentences. The books are here, are still read today, have inspired millions of others, and so are what literature means. I think the piece would be better if it were able to admit that unapologetically.
posted by mittens at 4:49 AM on February 20, 2023 [42 favorites]
mittens, many hard agrees! The persistence of discussion is itself a mark of importance. As to critical consideration, I'd say crime fiction (some stripes, anyway) get as much mainstream critical attention as any of them, though science fiction has likewise enjoyed some success in that regard, even if clearly and unrelentingly segregated into "the literature of ideas."
As to the failure of Branagh's films, I agree, and unfortunately I'd also add Malkovich's take on Poirot, which "humanizes" him into oblivion. A similar transition, I think, happened in a much more compressed timeline with Hannibal Lecter, who shifted in ~35 years from enigmatic evil into knowable evil into a beloved lead. And all of the versions are, have been, or will have been appreciated by some reader or viewer and engendered debate... thereby extending their creators' artistic lifespan
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:05 AM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
As to the failure of Branagh's films, I agree, and unfortunately I'd also add Malkovich's take on Poirot, which "humanizes" him into oblivion. A similar transition, I think, happened in a much more compressed timeline with Hannibal Lecter, who shifted in ~35 years from enigmatic evil into knowable evil into a beloved lead. And all of the versions are, have been, or will have been appreciated by some reader or viewer and engendered debate... thereby extending their creators' artistic lifespan
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:05 AM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
-I think those self-generated sympathies I mentioned function best over a pattern of repetition. If you read one Poirot, you don't have the same experience, you haven't built the same man with your personal hypotheses of his internal clockwork, that you would have if you'd read three or ten of the books. You do have to recognize the rhythms of the stories, the other characters' reaction to him, to have those feelings grow. He's very specifically not a dynamically-changing character in literature, and so your little gray cells do the dynamic work for him.
You have done an excellent job articulating something here that I think I have felt for a long time but couldn’t quite explain. I’ve been basically a life-long Christie fan, having first encountered her work as a middle-schooler, so I don’t know if reading Christie shaped my preferences or if she just tapped into how my brain already worked, but I have found that I often get frustrated/bored when crime fiction (especially tv mystery shows) start going into backstories, personal drama, etc etc of the detective. I don’t want to be made to worry about the detective, because I want to think about mystery.
Anyway, brilliant comment, thank you!
posted by DiscourseMarker at 7:04 AM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
You have done an excellent job articulating something here that I think I have felt for a long time but couldn’t quite explain. I’ve been basically a life-long Christie fan, having first encountered her work as a middle-schooler, so I don’t know if reading Christie shaped my preferences or if she just tapped into how my brain already worked, but I have found that I often get frustrated/bored when crime fiction (especially tv mystery shows) start going into backstories, personal drama, etc etc of the detective. I don’t want to be made to worry about the detective, because I want to think about mystery.
Anyway, brilliant comment, thank you!
posted by DiscourseMarker at 7:04 AM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
mittens, I've noticed the BBC Christie stories tend to emphasize a romance--even a very romantic backstory to Miss Marple which seemed odd. Are these love stories canon?
posted by armacy at 7:16 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by armacy at 7:16 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
There are more whirlwind romance in Christie stories, than I think there are in real life. But I'm not sure there are quite as many as in the TV adaptations. IIRC Marple herself doesn't have much of a canonical backstory beyond never having married, and more or less always having lived in St Mary Mead. So, it's not impossible that she had a romance when younger, but if she did it's not supposed to be fundamental to the character.
posted by plonkee at 8:59 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by plonkee at 8:59 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
I think one thing that writers like Christie and Doyle do well is to give just enough specific, offbeat details about their detectives (Poirot's OCD and unabashed egotism, Holmes' drug habit and martial arts experience) to make them intriguing, but very little else, letting the reader fill in the rest--the "why"--in their imagination. This creates a much richer character than one whose every detail and backstory is laid right out.
posted by gottabefunky at 9:40 AM on February 20, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by gottabefunky at 9:40 AM on February 20, 2023 [5 favorites]
I found it hilarious that they gave Poirot’s moustache the anime villain treatment—a tragic backstory before being killed off.
My personal top 5 Christies either don’t follow the formula or change it up a little like in Five Little Pigs.
posted by betweenthebars at 10:05 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
My personal top 5 Christies either don’t follow the formula or change it up a little like in Five Little Pigs.
posted by betweenthebars at 10:05 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
> As to the failure of Branagh's films, I agree, and unfortunately I'd also add Malkovich's take on Poirot, which "humanizes" him into oblivion
I thought Branagh's films were okay -- not great, but acceptable -- but the Malkovich one I tried made me angry, it was so bad.
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:58 PM on February 20, 2023 [4 favorites]
I thought Branagh's films were okay -- not great, but acceptable -- but the Malkovich one I tried made me angry, it was so bad.
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:58 PM on February 20, 2023 [4 favorites]
My personal top 5 Christies....
These being...? (I ask because I've never read of her work. My bad. Advice welcome.)
posted by BWA at 3:37 PM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
These being...? (I ask because I've never read of her work. My bad. Advice welcome.)
posted by BWA at 3:37 PM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
Read "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" for sure, just not as your first Christie.
posted by chavenet at 4:56 PM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 4:56 PM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]
The David Suchet Poirot is so thoroughly ingrained in my brain that I was really taken aback when Poirot was described in the novels as having a giant mustache.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:34 PM on February 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:34 PM on February 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
I'm not betweenthebars, and I came late to Christie (Sayers4Lyfe) but my top five of hers are:
And Then There Were None
Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side
5 Little Pigs
The Body in the Library
Not set in stone, though.
posted by PussKillian at 7:27 AM on February 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
And Then There Were None
Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side
5 Little Pigs
The Body in the Library
Not set in stone, though.
posted by PussKillian at 7:27 AM on February 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
My top five would be similar, but swap out The Mirror Crack'd for Murder On The Orient Express.
I also agree with Mittens above. It's ok to have stories which are driven by plot rather than character. You can't force the audience to find Poirot endearing by making up a backstory for him.
posted by harriet vane at 3:37 AM on February 22, 2023 [2 favorites]
I also agree with Mittens above. It's ok to have stories which are driven by plot rather than character. You can't force the audience to find Poirot endearing by making up a backstory for him.
posted by harriet vane at 3:37 AM on February 22, 2023 [2 favorites]
The trick for me in guessing the culprit in Agatha Christie novels was always not going by the information presented in the novel, but rather going externally by what combination/idea there had not been used yet. This is how you get that everybody is a murderer or nobody is or Poirot is (spoiler?), and so on. But, I must say, the one that really caught me was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which to this day I consider the greatest murder mystery ever written.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 9:58 AM on February 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Pyrogenesis at 9:58 AM on February 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
But, I must say, the one that really caught me was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which to this day I consider the greatest murder mystery ever written.
A-and the dramatic impact is all the moreso if you are a dedicated reader of this form, so that the subversion Christie achieves really rocks your cozy world.
posted by chavenet at 4:14 AM on February 23, 2023
A-and the dramatic impact is all the moreso if you are a dedicated reader of this form, so that the subversion Christie achieves really rocks your cozy world.
posted by chavenet at 4:14 AM on February 23, 2023
And Then There Were None and Five Little Pigs are definitely in my top 5.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a classic, but I don’t love it. The characters and setting are a little bland, while the best Christies add depth to the stock characters and they are used in interesting ways.
posted by betweenthebars at 12:31 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a classic, but I don’t love it. The characters and setting are a little bland, while the best Christies add depth to the stock characters and they are used in interesting ways.
posted by betweenthebars at 12:31 PM on February 23, 2023 [1 favorite]
the subversion Christie achieves
this, for me, is the real glory of Christie, in that on the surface the novels skate along underneath, and sometimes not even underneath, there is a wicked, wholesale ravaging of the whole enterprise. (The Mirror Crack'd is my current favorite because, if we're paying attention (and we're not, naturally) we know who and why within the first handful of pages and the rest of the book is just the unspooling. It is a formally very elegant piece of writing that very rightly takes its place as 'Leetooratschoor.')
Other favourites, lately, that haven't been mentioned The Pale Rider and Daughter of Time (whoops! Josephine Tey - but worth it) and Nemesis. There is something simultaneously opaque and transparent about characters like Marple and Poirot (and MacGee and Reacher and so on) in that the reader is not caught up in their back-story as much as their in-the-moment story. The way they react and act in the moment is what defines them and makes them so damn compelling.
posted by From Bklyn at 2:21 PM on March 9, 2023
this, for me, is the real glory of Christie, in that on the surface the novels skate along underneath, and sometimes not even underneath, there is a wicked, wholesale ravaging of the whole enterprise. (The Mirror Crack'd is my current favorite because, if we're paying attention (and we're not, naturally) we know who and why within the first handful of pages and the rest of the book is just the unspooling. It is a formally very elegant piece of writing that very rightly takes its place as 'Leetooratschoor.')
Other favourites, lately, that haven't been mentioned The Pale Rider and Daughter of Time (whoops! Josephine Tey - but worth it) and Nemesis. There is something simultaneously opaque and transparent about characters like Marple and Poirot (and MacGee and Reacher and so on) in that the reader is not caught up in their back-story as much as their in-the-moment story. The way they react and act in the moment is what defines them and makes them so damn compelling.
posted by From Bklyn at 2:21 PM on March 9, 2023
My favorite Christie mysteries are:
Crooked House (not a Poirot or Marple)
Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Cards on the Table
Dumb Witness (or Poirot Loses a Client)
posted by Caz721 at 2:48 PM on March 9, 2023
Crooked House (not a Poirot or Marple)
Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Cards on the Table
Dumb Witness (or Poirot Loses a Client)
posted by Caz721 at 2:48 PM on March 9, 2023
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