Blogging Books 4

Agatha Christie is undoubtedly the Queen of the elegant English mystery. She was prolific and endlessly fascinating although when you read the books straight through, like I do sometimes, you do discover similar plots or short stories that have become novels.

She has three main characters.

Hercule Poirot, Belgian detective, living in London and operating as a private, consulting detective. Poirot is fastidious and obsessively neat. His mustaches are never mussed; his clothes are never allowed to wrinkle or have a fleck of lint; and everything in his apartment is in perfect order. Even his breakfast eggs must be of the same size. This weird compunction for order comes from a well-ordered mind in which Poirot thinks up the answers to the most baffling mysteries and brings the murderer to justice. Poirot believes in the power of “the little grey cells” and will sit patiently in his chair and think while his rather bumbling friend, Hastings, and his Very efficient secretary, Miss Lemon, do the legwork and bring the clues to Poirot and Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard.

Miss Marple, dithering spinster of St. Mary Mead, is quite the opposite of Poirot. Everyone thinks Miss Marple is past her prime and is just a gossipy old lady. Everyone that is except Sir Henry Clithering of Scotland Yard who knows her to be one of the finest judicial minds in the country. She putters around her small village gathering news and gossip and then catches the criminal because he or she acts exactly like some young village upstart. Criminals learn to fear her because she is, as she says of herself, “a noticing sort of person.”

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are the other two main mystery-solving characters to grace Christie’s pages. They were in intelligence in WWII and remain helpful to some folks in the Home Office afterwards. Because of the times in which Christie was writing, Tommy is the one who gets called on and Tuppence has to figure out a clever way to be in on the action. She does of course.

Because I bought my books years ago, some of them while Christie was still writing, I am very aware of the sexism and racism that are occasionally reflected in them. It is not overt and I suppose easily skipped over while reading the excitement of murder most foul. On the other hand, it is there and can jump out at you unexpectedly ~ not often and not in every book ~ and I add this caveat in case you start your Christie reading at a used book store. Newer editions have changed some of the language to be more in keeping with today’s.

The other interesting difference in when Christie wrote and today: the definition of “old”. Except for Miss Marple who is in her 70s, everyone else who is considered old or dying or senile is in his or her 60s. That is just plain funny to me, who at 68 goes to the gym almost every day and is energetically living life. And it is an indication of how our life styles have changed. Nevertheless, Agatha Christie makes for great mystery reading and a chance to use “the little grey cells” to figure out the answer before her famous detectives.