Page 118 →Conclusion Literary Criticism and the Mystery of Christie’s Murderous Pleasures

Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan undoubtedly saw eye-to-eye on many issues during the course of their long marriage, and given their words on the subject of literary criticism, one can safely assume that they would agree on the futility of this book. Christie opined: “I write books which are meant to entertain people, and to sell for that reason. I have never seen any point in informal studies of an author’s work.”¹ Mallowan, adopting a franker tone, asserted: “I have the feeling, unfair perhaps, that the analytical critic of detective fiction is either a knave or a fool.”² As I reread all of Christie’s fiction to write this volume, one of Poirot’s chance remarks seemed to be speaking directly, although I hope ironically, to me: “Imbeciles are writing the lives of other imbeciles every day. It is, as you say, done” (Poirot Loses a Client, 73). While the entire point of this volume is to argue that Christie should not be dismissed as an unsophisticated writer, the quotation’s deeper relevance to this project and my efforts satirically hit home. Such a viewpoint is expressed more compassionately by Mark Easterbrook, the protagonist of The Pale Horse: “I had suffered from one of those sudden revulsions that all writers know…. What did they matter? Why did I want to write about them?” (4). A book’s conclusion is hardly the place for solipsistic navelgazing about the dignity—or indignity—of one’s efforts, but Christie’s and Mallowan’s viewpoints encapsulate the fundamental challenge of literary criticism, with Christie’s characters capturing many authors’ underlying apprehension of the ultimate futility of such arduous efforts.

For all that I have attempted to posit reasons behind Christie’s extraordinary success and the lasting appeal of her novels by examining seven central paradoxes of her corpus, and in doing so sought to contextualize what others have Page 119 →criticized in her fiction, Hercule Poirot’s comments on Ariadne Oliver’s fiction apparently capture Christie’s assessment of her own work: “I do not wholly approve of her works, mind you. The happenings in them are highly improbable. The long arm of coincidence is far too freely employed. And, being young at the time, she was foolish enough to make her detective a Finn, and it is clear that she knows nothing about Finns or Finland except possibly the works of Sibelius. Still, she has an original habit of mind, she makes an occasional shrewd deduction, and of later years she has learnt a good deal about things about which she did not know before” (Clocks, 109–10). These words were published in 1963, amid the final third of Christie’s career, and they likely represent her astute and unapologetic assessment of her strengths and weaknesses. Yes, improbable events and coincidences often advance her killers’ efforts, which are sometimes counterbalanced by equally improbable revelations of their guilt, even while her novels stand as striking original works in which the clues have been laid carefully and cunningly and her prose irresistibly edges readers along from beginning to end.

As many critics have disparaged Christie’s fiction as substandard literary fare, surely many will similarly dismiss this volume’s efforts to contextualize her achievements. The paradoxes collectively outlined in these pages—the autobiographical elements of her novels despite her reclusive persona, her inclusion in the pantheon of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction while ignoring her peers’ protocols for the genre, her status as “Queen of the Cozies” despite her often stark and occasionally hardboiled themes, her literary interests as refracted through the codes of genre fiction, her alternating and intermingling of comic and tragic themes, her simultaneous endorsement and critique of English insularity, and her disdain for adaptations that boosted her success—point to but cannot fully capture the mercurial reasons why so many readers continue to find her books virtually addictive, as many fans report a period of their life, whether in adolescence or adulthood, when they consumed as many of them as they could find. These paradoxes illuminate but cannot define Christie fully, and other readers have posited additional striking paradoxes in her literature and its reception, such as in Sophie Hannah’s perceptive question: “How are her books able to be, simultaneously, simple enough that 12–year-olds can love them, yet complex enough to pose an impossible challenge to a bright adult mind?”³

On a concluding note relevant both to the reception of Agatha Christie’s fiction and the efforts of Understanding Agatha Christie, perhaps literary criticism should unite its focus on the amorphously defined realm of aesthetics to concentrate equally on the more widely experienced field of pleasure. Critics may never agree on whether Christie’s novels succeed aesthetically—although I hope the discussions of the poetic, comic, and tragic elements of her fiction have advanced a defense of her on aesthetic lines—but surely all must concede that Page 120 →they have brought untold pleasure to millions and millions of readers. Literature should provide a realm of enjoyment as well of beauty. George Orwell posited of genre fiction: “All one can say is that, while civilization remains such that one needs distraction from time to time, ‘light’ literature has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or intellectual power.”⁴ In some instances, the “light” eclipses the “heavy,” and, even if one considers Christie’s work only as genre fiction and overlooks her more challenging themes and her literary achievements, it is nonetheless wondrous to consider her durable appeal, her books’ lasting pleasures, for so many readers. Surely there is no paradox, no mystery, in that.