Sunday, October 20, 2002		Books

Literary lives
Mysterious world of the Queen of Crime
Randeep Wadehra

"AGATHA Christie writing as Mary Westmacott" — this legend overshadowed the novel’s title, The Burden, which I had begun to read with great expectations. Though there was no Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, and hardly any mystery, the novel proved to be worth more than the money spent on it. A story of sibling jealousy, of one-sided love, of interplay of emotions in all their shades mixed with a sense of guilt keeps one enthralled till the last page. Yet the publishers felt compelled to use the famous Christie name while repackaging this novel for the market! Such is the popularity of mystery thrillers.

Agatha Christie was born in Torquay on September 15, 1890. The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) began her career. In her lifetime she wrote 68 mystery novels, 19 plays, and more than 100 short stories. For quite a few of us it might come as a surprise to learn that the Belgian Hercule Poirot is the only fictional character to have had an obituary appear on the front page of The New York Times.

Agatha’s first marriage, to Archibald Christie, ended in divorce in 1928. In 1930, while travelling in West Asia, she met an English archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. They were married that year, and from then on Christie accompanied her husband on annual trips to Iraq and Syria. She used her experiences during these expeditions as material for Murder in Mesopotamia (1930), Death on the Nile (1937), and Appointment with Death (1938).

It may be pertinent to mention that the famous writer of mysteries also wrote romantic novels under the pen name Mary Westmacott like Absent in the Spring, A Daughter’s a Daughter, Giant’s Bread, The Rose and the Yew Tree, and Unfinished Portrait. She also wrote a couple of novels using her second husband’s surname as a suffix, such as Come, Tell Me How You Live and Star Over Bethlehem.

Agatha Christie crafts her narrative to perfection. Words conjure up images, and dialogues bring out the speaker’s character. Celebrated as the Queen of Crime and the Duchess of Death, Christie was endowed with a sharp insight into human nature, the motives that fashioned people’s actions and reactions, their relationships and conflicts. If the romantic novels leave your senses tingling with acrid lusciousness, then her mystery plots keep you agog with the edge-of-the-seat excitement.

Words waltz around motive, means, and opportunity. The scene of the crime, the victims and the villains, the conflicts and resolutions, and the plot are inter-woven into a graphic whole. She metamorphosed murder into a mind-game, where intrigue became a combination of chess moves and the end a satisfactorily resolved crossword puzzle. In her later years she admitted that she had never met a murderer. She further remarked, "I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides poisons are neat and clean and really exciting... I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body in the face. It is the means that I am interested in. I do not usually describe the end, which is often a corpse."

If you find her plots absolutely baffling, give credit to her deceptively simple storyline. She had a talent for veering and weaving clues and characters and red herrings together into tight, fast-paced tales. She always remained honest with her readers and resisted the temptation to suppress the critical clue or hide the culprit in obscurity. In any given story of hers, she presented every vital lead to the reader in lucid and concise prose—but even the most astute reader would find it tough to solve the mystery before the last page. And, speaking of last pages, Agatha Christie also had a trick of pretending to have her detective solve any given case, but waiting till the very last page before exposing the real answer. She adroitly spun her web around her readers and entrapped them in her world of mystery and intrigue, footsteps in the night, clues and red herrings, and, in the end, justice enforced and good prevailing over bad.

Her most famous detectives are Miss Marple —an apparently sweet old lady who resides in a small English village and studies human nature — and the affable but sharp Hercule Poirot — a dapper and meticulous retired police officer who began his career in Belgium but migrated to England during World War I. It is said that Agatha Christie herself preferred Miss Marple, but Poirot’s books sold much better. Since, for many years, Christie lived off her writing, she generally wrote what would sell; and so Poirot appears in far more stories than does Miss Marple. Hercule Poirot first appeared in 1920 in Agatha Christie’s first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles, whereas Miss Marple first appeared in the novel The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. Christie also wrote several short stories with Miss Marple as the protagonist.

Her stories make one contemplate crime, punishment, and justice. Criminals of all types, with all kinds of motives, people her tales. Surprisingly, a reader might even begin sympathising with one of her criminals’ motives. This triggers off an interesting thought process about human nature and society at large.

Christie’s plays include The Mousetrap, produced continuously in London since 1952, and Witness for the Prosecution (1953; film 1957), for which she received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for 1954-1955. Her stories have been made into a number of television series and films, most centering around her characters Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

In 1971 she was made a DBE. Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie died on January 12, 1976.