Regular readers will note that there are certain recurring characters in this blog. It’s rare that I go more than a few weeks without a mention of Stephen Sondheim, for example, or Isaac Asimov. Not quite at their frequency but still an often mentioned personage is the Queen of Crime, Dame Agatha Christie.
Hard as it is to believe, it’s been 50 years since she died, as Cathy Young of the Bulwark reminded us recently.
FIFTY YEARS AGO THIS WEEK, the world lost a writer who remains the top-selling novelist of all time, having sold, to date, more than two billion copies in forty-four languages: Dame Agatha Christie, the “Queen of Crime” who died at the age of 85 at her home in a small town in Oxfordshire. Christie’s career spanned most of the twentieth century. Her first mystery novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which introduced her famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, was written in 1916 and published in 1920. Her last novel, Sleeping Murder—featuring Christie’s other recurring sleuth, Miss Marple—was written in the 1940s and published in 1976 after her death. She redefined the detective genre and became its icon (and sometimes affectionately mocked its clichés). While she was certainly not the first successful female author in that genre, she established—with her contemporaries Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh—that the genre was one in which women were not only equal but dominant.
And, a half-century after her death, she has lost none of her ability to rivet the reader.
Young points out:
Christie’s work is not great literature; but can she be seen, in her own way, as a great writer? I would say yes. Her books are often regarded as brilliantly constructed puzzles in which psychology and characterization take a distant back seat to the plot. Yet mystery writer Sophie Hannah argues that the criticism is unfair: “Each of her novels demonstrates a profound understanding of people—how they think, feel and behave—all delivered in her crisp, elegant, addictively readable style.” One reason some characters may feel flat, Hannah points out, is that we often don’t see all of their dimensions until the puzzle is put together: the big reveal suddenly upends most of what we thought we knew about one or more characters. Indeed, in many Christie classics (Death on the Nile, Peril at End House, A Murder Is Announced), the murderer isn’t the only one with a secret, and nearly every character isn’t what he or she seems.
There’s a reason Christie’s books remain so popular. Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, The Last of Us) has said he still reads Christie to try to understand how she works her sleight of hand.
What brings Christie to mind is the recent Netflix adaptation of a very early Christie thriller, The Seven Dials Mystery.
In recent years Christie’s work has received several excellent screen adaptations, including a very faithful version of And Then There Were None (I loved it but my sister thought it a bit slow moving) and the more recent Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
But there have also been some vomitous versions that should never have seen the light of day. Like all the crappy ones where Kenneth Branagh pretends to play Hercule Poirot, for example.
I haven’t seen the new Netflix show yet, but I have just read the book. I didn’t think I had read it previously, but several plot points seemed familiar as I came across them, so perhaps I did read it in the distant past.
Some critics have referred it as having a preposterous solution, but they seem to be missing the point.
Val McDermid puts his finger on it when he says:
The Seven Dials Mystery isn’t a thriller. It’s a pastiche of a thriller, an antidote to the gung-ho chest-beating of the boys. It’s wry, it’s got its tongue planted firmly in its cheek and it subverts the whole genre it appears to be part of, not least because as well as all of this, it also delivers cleverly dovetailed plotting with a typical Christie flourish at the end. “Ah yes,” we sigh. “Fooled again.” If one of our Young Turks did something similar with the thriller now, we’d all nod sagely and go, “how very postmodern, how very self-referential and knowing, how very metafictional.”
Christie wrote it shortly after her divorce from her first husband, that unfaithful scoundrel Archie Christie, when she was badly in need of funds, and she found the writing of thrillers much easier than writing whodunits. So she was able to churn it out much more quickly.
It abounds with humor from its very first sentence. In fact, it reads rather like a thriller that was written by P.G. Wodehouse. I found myself smiling most of the way through it, and even chuckled out loud a couple times.
Is the solution preposterous? Well, yes, if you take the thing too seriously, I suppose it is. But have you ever read a Bertie Wooster and Jeeves story by Wodehouse? Did you take it seriously? I’m certain Christie never expected anyone to take The Seven Dials Mystery seriously.
It starts when a group of young folks decide to play a practical joke on a friend of theirs and they go and buy eight alarum clocks. By the way, Christie knows how to spell “alarm” but she prefers “alarum” for the clocks. Needless to say, the joke falls flat when their friend turns up dead.
There are many different editions of the book to choose from. There’s one that has all new illustrations of the characters, for example.
Here’s a sample:
Or one that claims to be annotated:
After writing the above, I started to watch the Netflix series Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials. I notice the trend lately has been to put Christie’s name in the title of the TV adaptations. Anyway, I watched about 15 minutes of the first episode and whatever that is, it is not the Agatha Christie story. Once again, the adapter seems to have thrown all the character names and situations into a blender and then mixed them up and arrived at a new story. It began with some guy being gored to death by a bull, but Christie didn’t have any bull in her story.
It may very well be a good story—except the writer clearly thinks the viewers are idiots because the practical joke that sets the story in motion is not handled nearly as deftly as in Christie—but it’s definitely not Agatha Christie’s. I don’t think I’ll bother watching the rest of it.
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