Theodore Dalrymple sees more in the novels of Agatha Christie than I ever could. Of course, I have not read even a sentence of Christie’s prose. I’ve seen several film adaptations of her books but the only one I remember in any detail and with any pleasure is René Clair’s And Then There Were None (1945), mostly because of Barry Fitzgerald. In “Agatha Christie & the Metaphysics of Murder,” Dalrymple conducts an interesting experiment:
“My method would be to
take every passage of possible social, psychological, or philosophical interest
and deal with it in succession, and decide whether, taken at the end, they
amounted to a Weltanschauung, a worldview. This method would not show
any development in the author’s ideas, of course: it would be a snapshot rather
than a film.”
This is not the way I have
ever read a novel. Dalrymple, a retired physician, is conducting a literary post-mortem.
Not that I have a systematic strategy. I read intuitively, trusting
the author’s gifts for plot, character and language will keep me alert and amused
– until he doesn’t. Ideas matter less to me than story and people. In my
experience, ideas often leave novels stillborn. I don’t recall many of Tolstoy’s
thoughts on Napoleon and history but Pierre Bezukhov and Natasha Rostova might
as well be in the next room.
From Christie’s more than
eighty novels Dalrymple picks one of the Miss Marple titles, They Do It With
Mirrors (1952), which permits him to comment on class, poverty (genteel and
otherwise), bohemianism (“Their unconventionality was parasitic on the
existence of convention”) and snobbery. See his digression on Occam’s razor. He
writes:
“What, then, has replaced gentility in social prestige? There is an obvious
answer: money. The advantage of money as the conferrer of prestige is that it
is easily measurable and ranked. The person with the most money has the most
prestige, all the way down to the person with the least. . . . Where money is
the measure of all things, manners and tastes are likely to be less refined
than in a society in which social hierarchy unrelated to money persists.”
Dalrymple contrasts
English and American schools of mystery writing, Christie with Raymond
Chandler. The latter I have read and enjoyed in toto but I’m otherwise
ignorant of most crime writing. Dalrymple is always lively when he takes on a
literary topic. He makes Christie, the bestselling novelist in history, an
interesting case but not interesting enough to move me to read her books.
3 comments:
You sell Dame Christie short. Her prose and manipulation of the fictional structure are masterful. Not to mention her scholarly detours. In “The Rose and the Yew”, which she wrote under a pseudonym, a character delivers an off-the -cuff character study of Iago, depicted, inter alia, as “ hating the human being who’s up amongst the stars”.
I have long loved the American hardboiled school - Hammett, Chandler, Ross MacDonald - but am only now sampling the well-mannered English; I read my first Christie just last year. It was the first Poirot, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. I enjoyed it enough to plan to read the second book, but I would say that the book's virtues were essentially extra-literary.
Last year, I purchased William Morrow's reprint, in one volume, of all 51 Hercule Poirot stories. Guess it's time to dive into that. Only 867 pages!
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