A guilty pleasure
Denis Altman’s defence of Agatha Christie is interesting. I was particularly taken by this summary:
The queerness of Agatha lies in the way in which she suggests another and less ordered world lying beneath conventional middle class English prejudices and class structures. Poirot’s obsession with order – he once remarked he would prefer eggs to be square than round – resonates with the theory that detective fiction is about restoring harmony. But, like Miss Marple, who constantly reminds us that evil is everywhere and can discern a mass murderer through his resemblance to the newsboy who teased cats in St Mary Mead, he also knows that civilisation is a thin veneer that at any time can be threatened by human greed and irrationality.
I think the reason it jumped out at me was the reference to Poirot and eggs, and an earlier question: “who has not … been caught up in the sheer ingenuity of plotting in books like Murder on the Orient Express“?
It reminded me of Raymond Chandler’s 1950 essay, The Simple Art of Murder, which referred to Poirot and an eggbeater and a crime committed on a famous train:
And there is a scheme of Agatha Christie’s featuring M. Hercule Poirot, that ingenius Belgian who talks in a literal translation of school-boy French, wherein, by duly messing around with his “little gray cells,” M. Poirot decides that nobody on a certain through sleeper could have done the murder alone, therefore everybody did it together, breaking the process down into a series of simple operations, like assembling an egg-beater. This is the type that is guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a halfwit could guess it.
There are much better plots by these same writers and by others of their school. There may be one somewhere that would really stand up under close scrutiny. It would be fun to read it, even if I did have to go back to page 47 and refresh my memory about exactly what time the second gardener potted the prize-winning tea-rose begonia.
I think that answers Altman’s question!
But Chandler is not entirely scathing; he concedes “[t]he English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.” A guilty pleasure.