|
Agatha Christie
Robert Holtom investigates the enduring allure of Agatha Christie, novelist, playwright, lover
Posted 4th June 2009 | Author: Robert Holtom
From Issue TT09 of Etcetera (Views: 131)
Name a few famous female authors. Austen, obviously. Plath, perhaps. Woolf, on a bad day. But there will be one great name that you will have forgotten. The name of an authoress outsold only by the Bible and the great Bard himself. She is the writer of 80 novels and the creator of two of the most popular detectives of all time. Her name is
Agatha Christie and there are many reasons why she ought to be remembered.
Christie’s works have a timeless appeal that has ensured their selling in the billions. The formula is simple—a murder, a deliciously caricatured array of suspects, numerous red herrings, a modest dose of sex and a spectacular denouement. Drawing these together are the wonderfully ridiculous mannerisms of Hercule Poirot or the surprisingly astute observations of Miss Marple. It is a pattern that has worked time and again, yet never fails to surprise—no two twists are the same. You might assume that it is the most unlikely person ‘whodunnit’, but more often than not you’d be wrong; narrators, detectives and even children have proved to have murder on their minds.
Behind the intelligence and humour, moreover, lay a truly remarkable woman. Christie lived through turbulent times; she worked as a nurse during the First World War and then married an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps, divorcing him after discovering he had had an affair with another woman. She then mysteriously vanished for eleven days. Upon her reappearance, she settled down with archaeologist Max Mallowan and accompanied him to far-flung corners of the globe, providing much inspiration for her more exotic mysteries.
However, despite the critical acclaim for her novels, there is one area of Christie’s expertise that is often overlooked–her playwriting. Need we mention that she wrote The Mousetrap, the world’s longest running theatre production (it began on 25th November, 1952)? Novels come to life in the reader’s mind but plays come to life right in front of one’s eyes. Suddenly, the static words on the page are energised in a cacophony of voices, colours and movement. There’s no difficulty in imagining the drunken Colonel slyly helping himself to another dram of whiskey or the femme fatale casting her seductive gaze across the room: there they are performed right in front of you. What’s more, the mere experience of being in a room full of people equally baffled as to who the murderer could be, and equally enthralled by the action on stage is enjoyable in itself.
To watch an Agatha Christie production realised on stage is to take a journey of sorts, a journey from ignorance to enlightenment; at the end all will be revealed, justice will be done and, more often than not, those who should be together will be together. Christie was a romantic at heart (she wrote a series of romantic fiction novels under the nom de plume Mary Westmacott) as well as a staunch moralist: only very occasionally do her murderers get away with it, and usually because there is an element of righteousness to the killing. But greed, jealousy and lust do not suffice as justifiable motives, and the sins of the past cast long shadows. Beyond the pink gins and ivory cigarette holders, watching or reading an Agatha Christie can, unexpectedly, tell us a good deal about the ‘human condition’. And they’re pretty good fun too.
user comments
|
etcetera.online