Let's write more about the Dame of mystery- Agatha Christie

In The New York Times: "The Mystery of My Obsession With Agatha Christie. "People were dying all around me. So why was I escaping into tales of murder?" writes Jamie Fisher, in The New York Times "Letter of Recommendation" column.

"The more time I spent with Detective Hercule Poirot, the more our COVID pandemic routines started to seem less like boring compulsions and more like apprentice detective work."

Agatha Christie (1880-1976): Writer of 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

Although I have not ready every one of Agatha Christie's "Dame of mystery" books about murder, and "whodunit", the fact is, the stories I have read are unforgettable. In fact, Christie introduces us to every kind of mystery twist a reader could possibly imagine by providing enduring and entertaining narrative.

It doesn't take long to read most of her mysteries, but every story is packed with suspense in all its formats. "The Mouse Trap" continues to entertain in books, the movie and for 65years in London's St. Martin's Theater. Agatha Christie's legendary 'whodunit' is still delighting and thrilling audiences in London's West End, as The Mouse Trap enters its 65th record-breaking year on stage. Running at the St. Martin's Theatre since 1974, the original production opened across the road at the Ambassadors Theatre on 25 November 1952 and has since been presented in 27 different languages in more than 50 countries around the world.

The world's longest running show, The Mousetrap now has three entries in the Guinness Book of Records, including those for the longest continuous run of any show in the world, the ‘most durable’ actor (David Raven, who played Major Metcalf for 4,575 performances) and ‘longest serving understudy’ (Nancy Seabrooke, who stood by as Mrs. Boyle 6,240 times). Since The Mousetrap opened 450 actors and actresses have appeared in the play alongside 260 understudies, with a new cast joining the show every nine months.

Who can forget the ending of "Murder on the Orient Express"- the movie and it's remake are absolutely wonderful. Or, the Maj Jong scene, in "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" published in 1926. (In fact, I transcribed that one chapter in an article posted in this Let's Write blog. Check the blog- click here.) 

So, I was delighted when I read Jamie Fisher's commentary about why Agatha Christie still rules, in the New York Times opinion essay.

Echo: "I fell in love with Agatha Christie during the bad early days of the COVID pandemic, when many of us had lost someone and we were afraid to touch our mail".

It started when a friend invited me to join her remote book club and sent along a pirated copy of, “A Murder Is Announced.” 

Indeed, the book was my introduction to Christie’s indefatigably English world of gentleman detectives and civilized old ladies, their knitting needles and logical faculties clacking away. The murders themselves are “of quiet, domestic interest,” as Christie told Life magazine in 1956: clean, ludicrous comfort food. 

So, I ended up outpacing the book club and staying up until midnight to polish off “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.”

It might seem perverse to have escaped into murder mysteries at a time when people were suddenly dying all around me, but Christie offered deaths that were orderly and manageable. Her murders are committed in midcentury vicarages and hamlets with names like Chipping Cleghorn and Nether Mickford. On the whole, the closest people come to dying of illness is strychnine poisoning, and the only communicable disease that matters is a lust for dispatching one’s neighbors with their own scarves. Her books are basically fairy tales that happen to have a lot of dead people in them.

The Christie detective whose company I most enjoy is Miss Marple, who spends an alarming part of her time hiding in cupboards and flushing pinkly. But the character who got me through the pandemic was Hercule Poirot, that mustachioed and gloriously petty rationalist, finding clues in every hint of disorder. Poirot makes breakthroughs by sniffing carpets, tweaking chairs, observing that a flower bed is either in disarray or menacingly undisturbed.

In a Christie novel, we don’t know who did it or how they did it, but we know that we’ll eventually find out both. I found myself contrasting this enviously with the panicky stasis of the pandemic, when sometimes it seemed as if we knew too much about the murderer (spoiler alert: It was the coronavirus) and sometimes infuriatingly little (could it strike twice? What in God’s name was it doing to toes?). We had a collective national sense that the butler did it, but we couldn’t make him leave the house. By contrast, Agatha Christie was a refuge of definitive resolution.

Yes, it is probably coincidental that Poirot was first introduced in 1920, on the tail end of the great influenza pandemic; Christie wrote “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” four years earlier, while nursing soldiers in Devon. 

But Poirot is the patron saint for the world of soul-numbing procedural care we found ourselves in last year, and might find ourselves in for the foreseeable future. His watchwords are “order and method.” The more time I spent with him, the more our pandemic routines started to seem less like boring compulsions and more like apprentice detective work. If I was fussing over hand-washing procedures, or eyeing every slightly crooked mask with suspicion, maybe I was just a Poirot in the making.

This is not to say Christie’s universe is, on the whole, an orderly place. Indeed, her mysteries often feel ghostwritten by Camus. On the one hand, we have logical Poirot, parsing the crime scene to determine whether the furniture is adequately symmetrical. On the other, we have the completely absurd universe that Poirot occupies. The plot twists are, as my book club complained happily over Zoom, unfair. People have identical twins as a matter of course. They put out advertisements in the local paper inviting neighbors to a murder. They strangle girl scouts as a diversionary tactic. They have disturbingly free access to obscure and deadly chemical reagents.

And yet Poirot, like Sisyphus, is happy. His world is utter hooey, but he finds satisfaction in small pleasures, like a properly dusted mantelpiece. There’s something both deluded and encouraging about this; I wanted to roll my eyes at Poirot, but I also found myself turning to him as a spiritual teacher. What could he teach me about coping with a world that didn’t make sense? And later, as vaccines rolled out: What he could teach me about trying to return to a world we can’t trust? Two world wars and a pandemic elbowed their way into Christie’s life, and then everyone was expected to go on working and gardening and buying cans of condensed milk as if the world hadn’t recently been set on fire. That bipolarity is embedded in Christie’s books. Life magazine wrote admiringly of “the unruffled cheerfulness of these doomed people.” In writing “quiet, domestic” murders, Christie warned us that our quiet domesticity can be interrupted at any time, but she also held out hope that it might return, perhaps in the epilogue.

In recent months, my fixation on Christie has loosened. I am now able to read books without bodies in them, mostly. But I still wonder what it means to be doomed and unruffled, and if that’s a power anyone would really want. The indulgence of Christie is the dream of vacationing, for a little while, in a static world where people never stopped leaving their doors unlocked or gossiping viciously at the local fishmonger’s. But it’s also a dream of something remarkable interrupting the stasis: a mysterious clutch of pearls, a set of men committing crimes in costume beards, a body in the library, a terrible virus. It comes into your life with the force of revelation, maybe changes you forever. And then you go quietly back to the vicarage.

Jamie Fisher is a writer whose work focuses on culture and literary criticism. She is working on a collection of short stories.