by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show Charles and I watched last night was an Extraordinary
Women episode on Agatha Christie, who with
one exception — her mysterious “disappearance” in 1926, shortly after she
suffered the double whammy of the death of her mother and her first husband’s
request for a divorce because he’d fallen in love with someone else — led a
long and singularly boring life. Indeed, like Alfred Hitchcock, Christie is of
interest mainly because of the bizarre incongruity between the dark subject
matter of her stories (not only murder but particularly nasty murders — the
show made the point that she’d worked as a volunteer nurse during World War I
and much of her job had been to hand out medications, many of them with highly
toxic side effects, and this had led her to research poisons and use poison as
a murder weapon in a lot of her stories) and the dull, respectable British
lifestyle she lived. I’ve never been a big Christie fan for the same reason
Raymond Chandler wasn’t — he said she ignored character and created
stick-figure people just to set up a “whodunit” puzzle — though he admitted to
admiring one of Christie’s most famous “trick” books, The Murder of
Roger Ackroyd, in which the story’s
narrator, the assistant to detective Hercule Poirot turns out to be the
murderer — it was attacked at the time for violating the conventions of mystery
fiction but Chandler, in what was just about the only nice thing he ever said
about Christie, said that it was so obvious that the narrator was the only
possible murderer that instead of a puzzle it was a challenge to the reader to
“catch me if you can.”
The show also covered the often estranged relationship
between Christie and her daughter, and claimed that the publication of Curtain, the novel Christie wrote in the early 1950’s in
which Poirot is killed off, was authorized by Christie’s daughter against
Christie’s own wishes. (My understanding was she had written stories in which
both Poirot and Miss Marple died — the one that killed off Miss Marple was Sleeping
Murder — with the intent that these be
released immediately after her own death so the cycles featuring her two most
famous characters would both come to a close once she was no longer around to
write them.) The show noted that, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Christie became
bored with her most famous detective character but felt compelled to continue
writing about him simply because he was so popular and lucrative. Christie was
one of those authors who was shy, reclusive, odd-looking — when they first
showed a photo of her in her dotage I joked, “She looks like a cross-breed
between Eleanor Roosevelt and the Queen” — and in a film clip of the real
Christie (there aren’t many film clips of the real Christie, especially ones in
which she both shows herself and speaks) on the occasion of the 10th
anniversary of her play The Mousetrap — the longest-running theatrical production in history — she talks
about how much she hates making public appearances and being interviewed. I’ve
never been that interested in
Agatha Christie — though I read her book Ten Little Indians (originally it had a considerably less P.C. title!)
in the 1960’s and quite liked it, and more recently I was startled when Charles
and I watched the 1937 British film Love with a Stranger, based on a Christie story called “Philomel Cottage,”
and I called it “a real surprise since it’s a psychological thriller rather
than a whodunit, and is one of the few times in her writing career that
Christie actually gave a damn about character development and real emotion
instead of just creating stick-figure people and having them enact a murder
mystery.” Frankly, I wish she’d done more stories like that, though I certainly
can’t fault her for being the kind of writer she was and giving the people what
they wanted!
