My Significant Authors: Agatha Christie

This post comes issued with a warning notice: what follows will be a fairly impassioned defence of popular literature, and if the reader stumbling across these lines thinks that easy-read paperback novels are a kind of opium of the people, on a par with celebrity magazines and daytime chat shows, well, they may care to click on a different post. I’m a great believer in live and let live, and for that very reason I don’t take kindly to being told what I can and cannot read. If there’s one thing that really annoys me, it’s literary snobs. You’d think that people who loved reading, who had found the immense pleasure to be had in the simple accumulation of words on paper, would benignly welcome any foray into the literary world. On the contrary, working with books all my life, I have come across an awful lot of sneering and posturing and ‘oh surely you can’t possibly condone that rubbish’ kind of attitude that I feel is sadly unfortunate. As I said, everyone is entitled to their opinion, and I’m not about to make anyone read anything they don’t enjoy:but reading critically acclaimed literature does not provide a route to moral superiority. Just as reading Derrida and Proust and Goethe does not make me a better person, so loving detective fiction does not make me a worse one.

And I do love detective fiction. I’m especially fond of the Golden Age period, the 20s and 30s when Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers were writing, but there are many excellent crime writers in the contemporary book world: Colin Dexter sadly retired, and the wonderfully funny Sarah Caudwell sadly died, but Sarah Dunant, Michelle Spring, Reginald Hill, Jacqueline Winspeare and Clare Francis are all favourites of mine. Probably the best crime writer I’ve discovered recently is Andrew Taylor, whose Lydmouth series I devoured last autumn. When I settle down to a good murder mystery I feel just like I’ve booked myself into a spa. So much of my working life is spent trawling through great tomes of worthy intent, the nit-picky convoluted prose of theorists, the punctuation-free, character-free, plot-free extravaganzas of French experimentalists, writers whose use of arcane and obscure terminology has me hunting endlessly through dictionaries. Mostly it’s worth the trouble. But I find great pleasure in redressing the balance with some reading that is pure hedonistic pleasure, where I just sit back, unplug my brain and prepare to be entertained.

I read my first Agatha Christie novel at the age of 11 and settled down, for the first and last time in my life, to read an author’s entire oeuvre. Given that this was over a hundred books, it took me the next three years or so to finish the task. Back then my school friends teased me for reading anything at all, so the Christie obsession was ever born into a cold and judgemental world. But I loved her books so much. I found her solutions devilishly clever, was gripped by nostalgia, before I even recognised the word, for an era I had never experienced, and relished the discovery of dead bodies and cold-blooded killers in a story that was simply thrilling, rather than emotionally disquieting. The puzzle of it all appealed to me, and the bittersweet, almost unbearable suspense of waiting for the murderer to be unmasked, a gentle torture that is the point of reading the book in the first place. There’s a lovely moment in P. G. Wodehouse where Bertie Wooster has to interrupt his long-suffering butler Jeeves in the middle of reading Spinoza. Bertie apologises, adding, ‘and I’ll bet you’d just got to the good bit where they find the second body!’ I know exactly what he means.

Now if anyone is going to be criticised for being popular, it’s Agatha Christie. Her books are outsold only by the bible and Shakespeare, and she has clocked up something like three billion sales globally. Her novels are repeatedly adapted to screens both small and large, and her admittedly not very good play, The Mousetrap, has been running continuously since 1952. Now this is where the sneering starts to annoy me, because those who despise Christie seem to me to be patronising, in the most offensive manner, all those billions of people who like her. This is a typical example of the kind of attack she is subjected to, written on this occasion by Peter Lennon in The Guardian in 1990: ‘With the denouement the book instantly sheds its seduction; life seeps colourlessly from it as from a bicycle tube after passing over a sharp tack. The characters corrugate, crimp and fall to the ground […] You are not shocked that one of the pieces of cardboard committed a felony nor do you rejoice that a brown paper bag with a perm has not.’ Makes himself sound very clever, doesn’t he? But I don’t seem to recall a bestselling novel by Peter Lennon taking the globe, or even the UK, by storm. And given that style, I’m not surprised: how exactly would a person ‘crimp’? Later in the article he attends a meeting of the Crime Writers Guild and finds much ill will against Christie. The reason? People continue to buy her books mindlessly, reducing the market share for new and upcoming crime authors. Oh dear, what’s that nasty taste in my mouth? Oh yes, sour grapes.

There are so many books waiting for me to pick them up that I rarely reread, but a few years ago I suddenly wanted to know if the pleasure I had found in her works was merely due to the fact that I was a young and inexperienced reader. I read Peril at End House in an afternoon and was overjoyed to find that Christie had not changed so very much. Now if I am tired or ill or just want a little soufflé of a book, I will often turn to her work. Some of her best novels deserve a place in the ranks of greatest crime fictions: Appointment with Death, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Five Little Pigs, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, And Then There Were None, Sparkling Cyanide, Evil Under the Sun, Cards on the Table, Death on the Nile. It’s a very fine thing to be able to write a poignant, insightful, beautifully stylish, highbrow novel, but I think it’s just as much of a gift to be able to produce a gripping story that demands nothing more from the reader for their entertainment than a little of their time and good will. For that, Christie is justifiably famous.