'A Snapshot Rather Than a Film'

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.