Agatha Christie's Works

Book(s) Review: Agatha Christie’s Works

Agatha Christie is history’s best-selling novelist, on a par only with Shakespeare. Her works have been adapted over a hundred times, and her play The Mousetrap has been running continuously since it was first performed in 1952 (well, nearly continuously – it was interrupted only by COVID). But despite her commercial success and popular appeal, Christie is underrated. She rarely appears in must read / canon lists. Her work is dismissed as light reading, her style too simplistic, her characters too flat. My view is that these criticisms, accurate though they are, miss the point: Christie’s unadorned style, and the lack of complexity in her characters, are evidence of mastery, not carelessness, and as such, they are worth taking seriously: there is aesthetic merit in Christie’s work. This is the first reason I’m writing this review.

The second reason is the ethics implicit in her work: why is it that her novels are often described as cosy murder mysteries, to her heirs’ chagrin? It’s because the world she depicts in her stories is not just one of moral absolutes, but one where the unambiguous good inevitably triumphs over the unequivocal evil: there exists moral order. This is a comforting thought: as a friend of mine put it, ‘a world with Poirot in it is a better world’ (like me, my friend refuses to read or watch Curtain, in which Poirot dies.)

The aesthetic case for Christie

Per Aristotle, something is good in proportion to how well it achieves its purpose. The primary purpose of a whodunnit is to entertain; my argument is that Christie subordinates every aspect of her writing – her plot construction, her settings, her characters, her prose – to achieving that purpose. Her writing is good, not despite the fact that many of its elements can be seen as weak, but because of it: they are weak in some senses only because that’s what makes her books good at being crime novels. You can dismiss the goal to entertain as too shallow to merit aesthetic and artistic praise, but it requires skill; so at the very least, we ought to consider what it is that makes Christie’s novels work.

The most important thing in a crime story is the plot (at least, if it’s to be judged first and foremost as a crime story, which isn’t always the author’s intention – see, e.g., Inherent Vice). Back in 1928, another (now overlooked) crime novelist, S.S. Van Dine, came up with a list of 20 rules for whodunnits. As he put it,

“The detective story is a game. It is more--it is a sporting event. And the author must play fair with the reader. He can no more resort to trickeries and deceptions and still retain his honesty than if he cheated in a bridge game. He must outwit the reader, and hold the reader's interest, through sheer ingenuity. For the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws--unwritten, perhaps, but none the less binding: and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them.”

As it happens, Christie broke several of these rules^[1], but she did it while adhering to the spirit of Van Dine’s thesis, something a lesser writer wouldn’t have been able to do: she was fair to the reader. She did not rely on fantastic devices (such as the ones found in Japanese classics – knives thrust across slanting houses, and elaborate contraptions to remove murder weapons from locked rooms), on random characters appearing out of nowhere, or on impossible deductions a la Sherlock Holmes.

But the difficulty isn’t in playing fair, it’s in playing fair and still winning the game. It’s hard to figure out who did it in a Christie novel – like many of her fans, I sometimes find myself unable to name the guilty party, even if I’ve read the book before. Though the clues are there, though you can go back and re-read the book and realise you had everything you needed to figure out the solution, you’ll most likely miss them, because Christie places them with such skill that she manages to misdirect your attention without cheating in any way. An under-appreciated aspect of this is that Christie created plots where at least three to five characters are possible suspects, each with a valid motive and the opportunity to commit the crime; this sounds pretty basic, but it’s hard to pull off – many a whodunnit is easy to solve because there is but one suspect (a good example is Whose Body?).

Besides the technical skill, there’s the sheer range of imaginative ideas: a book where seemingly random victims are killed in alphabetic order; one where every single character is murdered; one revolving around a game of bridge, with the participants’ playing style giving away the murderer; a couple where the narrator did it; one where a child did it; one where the murderer wants to get caught; one where a murder is announced in the papers; and one where a murderer conducts a murder rehearsal. Readers do not get tired of reading the same old thing, because the same old thing is not to be found in Christie’s novels.

But Christie’s books aren’t entertaining just because they’re fun puzzles. They also create an immersive, enjoyable ambience. There are two types of setting in Christie’s novels, both alluring. First, we have the glamorous: the luxury trains, cruise ships, country houses, and exotic locations. These are as inaccessible to the modern reader as they were to Christie’s contemporaries, though for different reasons: back then, they were prohibitively expensive. Nowadays, they are all more-or-less affordable, but because of that, they’re banal compared to how they’re portrayed in Christie’s books. I can tell you from personal experience that travelling on the Orient Express you’re more likely to meet retired teachers than exiled Russian duchesses and American gangsters. Either way, the sense of mystery found in her novels is absent from readers’ real lives. Second, we have the conventional: the sleepy village, the London mews. These may be more familiar, and hence less exciting, but Christie portrays them in such an idyllic fashion as to make them desirable. Many of us would love to live in St. Mary Mead, despite its having a murder rate that would humble prohibition-era Chicago.

As I mentioned earlier, critics complain that Christie’s characters are too simplistic, bordering on being stereotypes. That’s true, but a whodunit does not require complexity, depth, or even humanity: that would be too distracting, even distressing. It says a lot about Christie that she could write novels where children die without the readers being left scarred. (In fact, the only Christie novel I’ve never re-read is Endless Night, an atypical Christie with much greater psychological depth than her other works: I found it too sad to read a second time.) Christie’s great-grandson ponders how murder can ever be considered cosy, but the answer is that one hardly cares about the victims in Christie’s books. They were just not real enough. Complaining about the flatness of Christie’s characters is like complaining about the wooden acting in Yorgos Lanthimos’s films: it’s overlooking that it serves a purpose^[2].

I’m not making the absurd claim that any crime novel whose characters lack psychological depth is good. There are at least two ways for characters to be bad: they can be poorly constructed – inconsistent and incoherent – or, more commonly in crime fiction, they can just be insufferable. I for one can’t stand Sayers’s Lord Wimsey, with his irritating habit of breaking into song, and even Sherlock Holmes gets on my nerves with his mock surprise when others cannot follow his impossible deductions. Christie creates characters who are believable enough without their psychology becoming a distracting focal point.

Now we come to Christie’s style. It’s characterised by short sentences, descriptive enough to give an accurate picture of whatever she’s trying to convey without unnecessary fluff:

“Frank Carter was a fair young man of medium height. His appearance was cheaply smart. He talked readily and fluently. His eyes were set rather close together and they had a way of shifting uneasily from side to side when he was embarrassed. He was inclined to be suspicious and slightly hostile.”

Contrast this to Margery Allingham:

“He was a little man who sat huddled in his high-backed chair as if his backbone was not strong enough to support his frame upright. His crop of faded yellow hair was now almost white, and stood up like a hedge above a narrow forehead. But by far the most striking thing about him was the flesh-coloured plate with which clever doctors had repaired a war-mutilated face which must otherwise have been a horror too terrible to think upon. From where he sat, perhaps some fourteen feet away, Abbershaw could only just detect it, so skillfully was it fashioned. It was shaped roughly like a one-sided half-mask and covered almost all the top right-hand side of his face, and through it the Colonel’s grey-green eyes peered out shrewd and interested at the tableful of chattering young people.”

There’s nothing wrong with this (except for the clumsy ‘like a hedge above a narrow forehead”), but notice how long-winded it is compared to Christie’s description, without being all that much more evocative.

This isn’t to say Christie was a terse writer a la Hemingway. There is playfulness and humour in her prose:

“Mr Satterthwaite was glad that the young people had gone to bed. He was not fond of young people in herds. He thought them uninteresting and crude. They lacked subtlety and as life went he had become increasingly fond of subtleties.”

Or

“Also, I had a friend – a friend who for many years never left my side. Occasionally of an imbecility to make one afraid, nevertheless he was very dear to me.”

In other words, Christie wrote simply but entertainingly. Once again, the form of her prose follows its function: it’s unobtrusive, it does not call attention to itself, but is nevertheless competent and well-crafted and funny. Contrast her to authors admired for their prose, like Hemingway or David Foster Wallace: their sentences may be beautiful as standalone artifacts, but they’re too self-conscious, even indulgent: almost any analysis of their work focuses on their style, rather than what they were trying to say. There’s no trace of such self-indulgence in Christie^[3].

I hope that it’s clear by now that when I grant the criticism that Christie’s characters are flat or that her prose is simple, I am not admitting they are bad. I am only conceding that they are not the reason for reading her books. C.S. Lewis once wrote an essay on aesthetics, where he argued that good art is that which rewards closer inspection, and bad art that which leaves us disappointed the more closely we look at it. By this definition, Christie produces good art: the more closely we look at her writing, the more we come to realise how well it fits what she’s trying to do.

Now, you can dismiss my assertion that readers of whodunnits do not want psychological depth, or prose that is beautiful in its own right.

This is a fair question! I’m not saying you can’t have both, that you should not read Raymond Chandler because his prose is too good. Just that you should not dismiss Christie, when the very lack of flair in her work works.

On Christie’s ethics

Why do readers find Christie’s books so comforting? I offer three reasons: the first is that there is little nuance or ambiguity when it comes to her ethics, with very few notable exceptions. The second is that her characters do not only have strong opinions on big things like murder, but also on the small things: whether one tells small lies, or even whether one wears turn down collars, can be signs of, if not moral, at the very least intellectual degeneracy. Her characters do not have uniform views on manners and etiquette, but they live in a world where manners and etiquette matter. Third, in Christie’s books it’s not just that good triumphs over evil, but that evil is seen as an anomaly whose correction is inevitable. These three things taken together mean that Christie’s world is fundamentally good and ordered.

Black-and-white morality is very common in pop culture fiction, so this isn’t a particularly distinguishing feature in Agatha Christie. What is noteworthy though is just how conventional Christie’s morality is. Some novels or films like to introduce pretend-complex characters or to inject a small degree of moral ambiguity: just enough to not be dismissed as basic, without it being so much as to make us question who’s the good guy. Not Christie. Even in the rare occasions when Christie introduces some nuance, as she does in Murder on the Orient Express, it’s her characters alone who grapple with their morality, not the reader. And it’s not just that Christie’s characters are unbending in their moral views, but that these moral views themselves are, as they themselves put it, so bourgeois, so uncritical, so… basic:

“I have a bourgeois attitude to murder. I disapprove of it”.

Her characters do not think that taking a life is inherently wrong – they have no qualms executing murderers. What they believe in is due process and the law, a law that is to be respected unthinkingly and without utilitarian calculation. In One, Two, Buckle my Shoe, Poirot unmasks the killer even though he knows that killer is indispensable to England’s prosperity:

“Don’t you realise, Poirot, that the safety and happiness of the whole nation depends on me?”
“I am not concerned with nations, Monsieur. I am concerned with the lives of private individuals who have the right not to have their lives taken from them.”

In other words, there are no layers to explore here, no justification for why some things are good and some things bad. There are rules, and they need to be followed, because that’s the right thing to do, and that’s all there is to say about it.

This adherence to rules extends to things like whether one is allowed to eavesdrop, snoop through other people’s possessions, or wear improper clothes. True, Christie’s characters do not all share the same views on what proper behaviour is like, and they might break their own rules, but when they do so it must be for a very good reason, and they will still feel deeply uncomfortable about it.

“The Old School Tie is the Old School Tie, and there are certain things (I know from experience) that the Old School Tie does not do! One of those things, Monsieur Fanthorp, is to butt into a private conversation unasked when one does not know the people who are conducting it.”

Or,

“Quite calmly he untied the ribbon and began to open out the letters.
‘Poirot,’ I cried, scandalised. ‘You really can’t do that. It isn’t playing the game.’”

This respect for decorum and protocol was comforting to Christie’s contemporaries: Christie wrote in a rapidly changing era, when technological progress and the world wars led to massive socio-economic upheaval. Her basically Victorian outlook^[4] gave readers a sense of stability. This is even more true for us modern fans: the collapse of strictly enforced norms is liberating but also bewildering and anxiety-inducing. There are few or no guidelines for anything – what clothes we should wear, how we should address each other (even more challenging in languages like French or German that have formal modes of address!), how much or whether to tip, how to give a compliment… no wonder the world where there are prescriptions for these things is appealing (if only because the readers are spared the dark and oppressive side of these norms).

Finally, the impression created by her books is that evil is not a big part of life, but a deviation from the norm. This isn’t so much a view expressed by her characters (or the implied crime rate) but by their attitudes. There is a prevailing sense of cheerfulness, of optimism, of the belief that not only their own moral worldview is unassailably right, but that it will prevail. This is the differentiating characteristic between Christie and authors such as Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, or even Arthur Conan Doyle: their characters are also incorruptible, but they are cynical. They perceive the worlds they inhabit as hostile, and themselves as rocks in seas of immorality. Maybe that makes them all the more virtuous – fighting for lost causes – but it makes their stories pessimistic, jarring, and disturbing. In contrast, reading Christie, you know that everything will be alright: Poirot will gather all the suspects in a room, he will analyse the case methodically, and will reveal the perpetrator. This, and the perpetrator’s comeuppance, are inevitable.

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In summary, Christie’s writing is timeless. Her aesthetic achievement can be compared to a Swatch watch: it’s easy to dismiss it as basic and undeserving of attention, but when you realise the skill it takes to ensure that every sentence, every character, every interjection of humour or even meta reference fits and interlocks like quartz crystals and oscillators to produce a precisely functioning whole, you can’t but admire the craftsmanship. And her ethics serve to remind us that unquestioning faith in a few basic rules can be more comforting (and perhaps edifying) than studying Aristotle or Rawls.