Page 1 →OneUnderstanding Agatha Christie

The Seven Paradoxes of Her Appeal

I began this book approximately six months into the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 because, like so many others secluded during the various states of lockdown, quarantine, and social isolation, I was bored. Remembering the speed, delight, and near-addictive obsession with which I tore through Agatha Christie’s novels during my junior high school years, it occurred to me that they might provide a similarly pleasureful diversion almost four decades later. Midway through those forty years, I earned a PhD in English literature, and I have spent the last twenty years as an English professor teaching and researching medieval masterpieces, primarily the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and the Arthurian legends. Part of my education included the distinction between literary fiction (lauded as the masterworks of the field) and genre fiction (denigrated as potboilers and pulp fiction), and as English departments still lean decidedly toward the former, I wondered if Christie’s murder mysteries, the genre fiction I voraciously consumed as a tweenager, would still pique my interest, appreciation, and admiration today. The short answer is: of course they did.

The remaining pages of this book divulge the longer answer to the question of Agatha Christie’s legacy, in which I hypothesize seven paradoxical reasons for the extraordinary popularity of her fiction. More than one hundred years after the publication of her first novel, The Mysterious Affair of Styles, in 1920, and almost fifty years following her death in 1976, her popularity shows little sign of dimming. Certainly, she is deservedly celebrated for creating several masterworks of detective fiction, notably The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, The ABC Murders, Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None, and The Witness for the Prosecution, along with a remarkably strong second-tier of novels, the names of which are not as widely known by the public but which amply reward readers exploring her canon more widely, including Appointment Page 2 →with Death, The Moving Finger, The Hollow, Crooked House, The Pale Horse, and Endless Night. Many of even the most devoted followers of Christie’s canon admit their disappointment with some titles—frequent nominees in this category include The Big Four, Passenger to Frankfurt, and Postern of Fate—a circumstance rendered less surprising given the fact that Christie herself conceded her disappointment with some of her fiction, evident in her distaste for The Mystery of the Blue Train: “I have always hated The Mystery of the Blue Train, but I got it written, and sent [it] off to the publishers. It sold just as well as my last book had done.”¹ With an output of more than eighty novels and short-story collections—some absolute gems, some sparkling a bit less brightly—the unevenness of Christie’s output is hardly surprising. Such unevenness is true of every prolific author, including such foundational figures of British literature as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, yet Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee and Prioress’s Tale, generally acknowledged among the clunkers of the Canterbury Tales, and Shakespeare’s Pericles and Two Gentlemen of Verona do not markedly detract from their authors’ reputations as literary geniuses.

In contrast to Chaucer and Shakespeare, whose literary reputations stand as ensured as can be imagined, Christie has continually been derided as singularly untalented, despite her unassailable pride of place in popular culture. Some of the more withering criticisms directed her way arose from fellow mystery writers who denigrated her style, plotting, and productivity. Raymond Chandler opined that the solutions of her mysteries were “guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a half-wit could guess it.”² P. D. James, author of the Adam Dalgliesh mysteries, condemned her style as “neither original nor elegant but … workmanlike” and damned her with faint praise: “Perhaps her greatest strength was that she never overstepped the limits of her talent.”³ Vladimir Nabokov is rarely critically shoehorned as a mystery writer, yet his Lolita is littered with clues about the precise nature of Lolita’s disappearance and the identity of the mysterious Clare Quilty; rather than discerning kinship with his fellow mystery author, Nabokov stated succinctly, “Agatha is unreadable.”⁴ Ruth Rendell, author of the Inspector Wexford series, averred that when holding one of Christie’s novels, “I don’t feel as though I have a piece of fiction worthy of the name in front of me.”⁵ Many of Christie’s colleagues, past and present, dismissed her abilities, despite her overwhelming success in winning the attention of readers.

Many such criticisms of Christie’s fiction overlook the necessity—or at least the pleasure—of a well-crafted puzzle structuring the plot of a murder mystery, and throughout the history of her critical reception, several reviewers have bluntly asserted that Christie could not write well while conceding her abilities as a puzzle fabricator. This line of thought is evident in Julian Symons’s appraisal: “She was not a good writer,” he asserts, although he acknowledges thatPage 3 →she was supreme mistress in the construction of puzzles and had a skill in writing light, lively and readable dialogue that has been consistently underrated by critics.”⁶ Michael Moon similarly views her popularity as resulting from “her exceptional ingenuity as a plotter and the reliable delivery of suspense and surprise in her narratives, combined with her straightforward ability as a storyteller and a scene-setter.”⁷ David Grossvogel dismisses her fiction as “never more than nostalgia and illusion” and proposes that “her continued success suggests only that the illusion has not yet receded completely beyond our ken.”⁸ Further to these points, some readers prefer Christie’s peers to Christie and offer applesand-oranges comparisons, as in Catherine Kenney’s evident preference for Dorothy Sayers and her assessment that “Sayers was working in a genuinely novelistic tradition, while Christie used narrative simply as a way of structuring the detective puzzle,” in which the adverbs genuinely and simply, as well the implied contrast between novels and puzzles, debase Christie’s accomplishments.⁹ As this brief overview of Christie’s detractors indicates, many critics would delight in plunging a dagger through the metaphoric hearts of her novels, dispatching them so that future generations would be freed from her conspicuous faults.

Tellingly, however, Christie’s novels often received rather glowing reviews from contemporary critics who assessed her achievements within the field of detective fiction and its expected parameters. The New York Times reviewer of The ABC Murders hailed it as “a baffler of the first water, written in Agatha Christie’s best manner,”¹⁰ and the Time reviewer praised Death on the Nile as “a story that is readable, implausible, but contains the most genuinely surprising solution of the month.”¹¹ In a somewhat skeptical review of Appointment with Death, Kay Irvin nonetheless praised the author’s corpus as a whole: “Even a lesser Agatha Christie story holds its readers’ attention with its skillful management of suspense.”¹² Paul Neimark’s rave review of Endless Night—“Mrs. Christie has thrown down the gauntlet as never before and produced a surpassing mystery that is almost as fine a novel”—concluded by comparing her favorably to Thornton Wilder and Henry James.¹³ Similarly comparing Christie to a stratospheric literary talent, J. C. Trewin wrote in a review of her play Towards Zero: “One thing is plain: though Shakespeare could have enriched the dialogue of Mrs. Christie’s piece, she could have told him how to animate the plot of Timon [of Athens].”¹⁴ What these critics see—and what so many others miss—is that Christie’s work should be assessed according to the parameters of her métier of detective fiction, not to the nebulous aesthetic expectations of literary fiction. Robert Barnard summarized the views of Christie’s myopic critics and their perpetual failure to convince readers not to read her works: “In fact, all the common grounds of criticism and ridicule used against Agatha Christie work with a boomerang effect when we realize that she was essentially, and aimed to be, a popular writer, a good teller of tales.”¹⁵

Page 4 →Given these confused and confusing conditions between her unassailable and enduring popularity and the consistent drubbing meted out by many critics, readers (including her second husband, Max Mallowan) have posed the question of her appeal and posited their answers. Mallowan asked rhetorically, “What is it that has made for [her] overwhelming success?” and then theorized: “First the supreme art of telling a story, held by a continuous thread so that when you have read one chapter you cannot resist going on to the next.”¹⁶ Gillian Gill similarly queried, “Why is it that Agatha Christie is so phenomenally popular?” and volunteered that “Many other Golden Age novelists offered equally good puzzles … [but] Christie’s unique contribution was to create an original fictional world that is both totally convincing and highly unrealistic.”¹⁷ John Cawelti identified the secret behind Christie’s success as her “ability to design an unusually complex and well-balanced detection-mystification structure and to set it forth with enough character and atmosphere to give it some flesh but not enough to distract from the chain of inquiry that has made her the most successful living writer of the classical detective formula.”¹⁸ These theories and others of their ilk identify the appeal of Christie’s novels in their rapid pacing and their puzzling plotting, as well as in their immersive quality that invites readers to lose themselves in these fictional worlds

Building on such foundational insights, Understanding Agatha Christie offers a sustained contribution to this longstanding discussion by theorizing seven paradoxical reasons behind Christie’s phenomenal and long-lasting success. The next chapter, “Agatha Christie’s Life and Puzzling Persona,” offers a succinct biography of her life and times, including her childhood years in Torquay, her marriage to and divorce from Archie Christie, her subsequent marriage to Max Mallowan, and her growing success as the best-selling author of the century. More so, it posits that, whether purposefully or not, Christie cultivated an enigmatic image of herself over her decades in the public eye, notably owing to her mysterious eleven-day disappearance in 1926 but also to her steady refusal to publicize herself and her novels. Despite the tut-tutting of literary critics who proscribe reading fiction for the insights it provides into an author’s life, Christie encodes various personal experiences into her novels, thereby rewarding readers who treat her life as somewhat of a mystery in itself.

Moving from the author to her fictions, the subsequent five chapters posit that Christie’s popularity stems from the ways in which her novels upend ostensible binaries rooted in the creation and reception of mystery novels and thus fracture their generic expectations. “The Scofflaw of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction,” this volume’s third chapter, examines this celebrated period of literary production, usually dated between 1920 and 1940, in which the protocols of crime novels were increasingly, if only quasi officially, codified, and for Page 5 →which Christie showed little concern. Notably, many of the authors advocating inviolate precepts for mystery fiction were men, and Christie’s defiance of their rules for fiction infuses a gendered resistance to many of her novels. With such works as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, A Murder Is Announced, and Endless Night, Christie demonstrated the futility of constraining the genre’s possibilities and expanded it to include features that her contemporaries condemned.

The next chapter, “The Hardboiled Queen of the Cozies,” explores the tension between the subgenres of mystery fiction labeled cozy and hardboiled. Often lauded as the “Queen of the Cozies,” Christie is widely lionized for her role in establishing the expected tropes of this gentler mode of detective fiction, yet this title obfuscates her deeper concerns with themes of violence and its repercussions. Furthermore, the generic binary of cozy and hardboiled establishes an unnecessary gendered division—as the vast majority of gendered divisions are—between male and female authors of crime novels, as well as between their readers. This gendered division is further evident in the fact that several male authors of hardboiled fiction are increasingly enjoying recognition for their talents as literary authors, in another (wearying) instance of the denigration directed at artistic works associated too strongly with women’s talents and tastes. Given these conditions, it is apparent that the somewhat arbitrary designation of Christie as a writer of cozy fiction, whether purposefully or unintentionally, undercuts an objective view of women’s writing, with clearly pejorative repercussions to her authorial reputation.

Although many critics, including those cited a few pages earlier, dismissed Christie as a singularly bad writer, the following chapter, “The Poet of Genre Fiction,” takes seriously her poetic efforts—evident in the fact that she published several poems prior to The Mysterious Affair at Styles and continued writing verse throughout her life. Critics have also derided her poems as singularly dreadful, but the very fact that she pursued poetry alongside her prose publications highlights her interest in the aesthetic beauty of language across genres. Furthermore, many critics of Christie’s fiction appear strikingly unaware of the unique rhetorical and structural demands that mystery novels place on their authors, and this chapter also outlines her awareness of the genre’s requirements for settings, characters, and plots and her refusal to reframe them to the contours of literary fiction. Counterbalancing her predominant interest in murder mysteries and genre fiction, Christie’s six novels penned under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott—Giant’s Bread (1930), Unfinished Portrait (1934), Absent in the Spring (1944), The Rose and the Yew Tree (1948), A Daughter’s a Daughter (1952), and The Burden (1956)—collectively demonstrate her fluency with the protocols of literary fiction. Briefly, both Christie’s novels and her commentaries Page 6 →on fiction writing evince her awareness of the distinctions between genre and literary fiction, as well as her reasons for adhering to certain tropes of genre fiction and for refusing to adopt certain tropes of literary fiction.

Several of Christie’s novels, despite their bloodied corpses and tense investigations, are as amusing as they are enigmatic, and the chapter “The Tragicomic Themes of Christie’s Murders,” examines her particular brand of humor as influenced by the comedy of manners tradition. A sardonic comic tone infuses many of Christie’s novels as characters grapple with the social implications of murder, such as when one character wonders whether she will find herself the next victim and her interlocutor deadpans in reply: “Well, Edith … it depends so much, does it not, by whom the murder was committed?” (Clocks, 49). Interweaving complementary contrasts to such comic touches, Christie imbues many of her novels with tragic elements, which undercuts criticisms of the novels as insufficiently emotionally invested with their characters. Untimely deaths, even those of the miserable, the miserly, and the malicious, leave emptiness, confusion, and uncertainty about life’s transience in their wake, and Christie often showcases the emotional repercussions of murder while untangling the threads cloaking the killer. The paradox of Christie’s tragicomic themes expands the emotional impact of her tales, resulting in mysteries that might amuse, or sadden, or otherwise achieve a range of emotional reactions from readers beyond the intellectual satisfaction of her well-constructed puzzles.

The English settings of the vast majority of Christie’s novels reflect a hidebound and musty world, one with very little concern given to the representations of minorities of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and other markers of personal identity. In short, Christie’s characters inhabit a very white, rather wealthy, and fairly stuffy world. Yet at the same time that Christie naturalizes a white version of Englishness reflective of her upbringing and conservative worldview, she also embeds withering critiques of England and Englishness. This paradoxical tension is explored in the next chapter, “The Queer Insularity of Christie’s England.” Writing during and after the peak of British imperialism, Christie captures a world where many characters might prefer to revivify the “good old days” of England’s international hegemony, yet they must simultaneously confront the ways in which odd and othered characters, including her primary detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, resist facile and constraining constructions of Englishness. Upon closer examination, Christie’s England appears to be a queer place, more than one might initially expect.

The final chapter, “Christie’s Murders at the Movies … and Why She Disliked Them,” identifies the importance of cinematic and theatrical adaptations of Christie’s novels to her continuing success as a cultural icon. Christie regularly denounced these adaptations, lamenting the shifts in character and tone and lambasting particularly egregious, or simply creative, reimaginings Page 7 →of her works, but these adaptations have enlivened her source texts and maintained their vibrancy for subsequent generations. Following a necessarily brief overview of adaptations of Christie’s works in film and television, the chapter examines in depth the 1980 adaptation of The Mirror Crack’d, penned by screenwriter Barry Sandler, who shares his insights about the value of camp humor for adapting Christie’s mysteries. Christie praised relatively few productions of her novels, with the rare exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution (1957) and Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974), but regardless of whether she would have enjoyed or disdained the film adaptation of The Mirror Crack’d, it exemplifies the manifold possibilities of reframing her mysteries in ways she likely never anticipated.

When today’s literary critics attempt to demolish the reputations of contemporary writers of genre fiction, I am always tempted to caution them with the lessons of history, precisely because many works recognized today as literary classics are rooted in genre fiction. Early writers of science fiction, horror fiction, and mystery fiction are today respected as canonical authors worthy of critical praise and continued attention, including such names as H. G. Wells and Jules Verne; Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker; Edgar Allan Poe and Anna Katharine Green.¹⁹ Their reputations rose and fell as the centuries passed, and it is probable that the same fate is awaiting Agatha Christie. In his poem “Agatha Christie and Beatrix Potter,” John Updike praises Christie as “Full of cheerful art and nearly / Perfect craft.”²⁰ Updike’s poem brilliantly juxtaposes two authors often overlooked in discussions of literary greatness whose fiction will likely be read long past contemporary critical darlings. Perhaps, as discussed briefly in this volume’s conclusion, “Literary Criticism and the Mystery of Christie’s Murderous Pleasures,” if literary criticism changed its focus from purportedly great works to those stories that provide the greatest lasting pleasure, it would better respect the reading public and better theorize the manifold joys of literature. In Understanding Agatha Christie, my goal is to explore the pleasures of Christie’s texts, the scope of her achievements, and these seven paradoxes key to her lasting appeal, rather than to worry about any snobs who would not stain their hands with a book jacket featuring a bloodied corpse.