Agatha Christie

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The Mistress of Complication

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It was the plotting of crime that fascinated [Agatha Christie], not its often unpleasant end, and it is as a constructor of plots that she stands supreme among modern crime writers. Raymond Chandler once said that plotting was a bore, a necessary piece of journeywork that had to be done, and that the actual writing was the thing that gave the author pleasure. Agatha Christie's feelings were almost the opposite of these….

Her most stunningly original plots are those in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The A.B.C. Murders and Ten Little Niggers (also evasively called And Then There Were None and Ten Little Indians), but although these are her major achievements, she showed from the beginning an extraordinary assurance in handling the devices in a detective story plot.

Her first book. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920 but written some years earlier…. In general it is true that nothing becomes out-of-date more quickly than an old detective story but Styles, which was turned down by several publishers, remains wonderfully readable today. In part this is because of Poirot, but it is chiefly a tribute to the plot.

Most Christie plots are based upon a single and fairly simple circumstance, which is then elaborated and concealed. In Styles the plot springs from the fact that in England somebody acquitted of a crime may not be tried for it again. (pp. 27-8)

There are other felicities in Styles, in particular several of those deductions that trick us by their very simplicity….

Styles was a splendid beginning. Not all of the books that succeeded it were on the same level, and the semi-thrillers that used what has been called a 'master criminal' theme seem to me inferior in almost every way to the orthodox detective stories. But as Agatha Christie's skills developed, a pattern emerged which might be called the typical Christie plot form. It was used by other people too, but by none so well or so variously as in her books. The form consisted of gathering a number of people together in a particular place preliminary to one of them being murdered, and of showing the reasons for their presence. It is a way of creating a totally closed society, and one can see it happening in very different books: Death in the Clouds (1935) (Death in the Air in America), Cards on the Table (1936), Death on the Nile (1937), and Ten Little Niggers (1939). To look at the way in which these plots are devised and carried through is to see the high skill that was, with almost deceptive casualness, employed in them. (p. 29)

[The reader should be aware of the] kind of trap she sets—there are people who claim to be able always to tell the villain in any Christie story by such an awareness. I couldn't make this claim myself, and indeed I doubt whether it is possible to be specific about the 'kind of trap'. Even the pattern I have called the typical Christie plot form does not apply to the majority of her books, although it is used in a high percentage of the best ones. But her work is astonishingly varied. There is a whole slew of books that take their settings from the fact that her second husband Sir Max Mallowan is an archaeologist, concerned chiefly with Assyrian culture, and that she often accompanied him and to some extent shared his interests. But although archaeology has a place in several stories her readers are never oppressed by a feeling of ignorance. She had an instinctive awareness of just how far her audience would wish her to go in showing expert knowledge, and no Agatha Christie mystery depends for its solution on a knowledge of ancient artefacts. (pp. 32-3)

One sees certain things more clearly in looking back at her work than was apparent when reading the books as they were published. One is the supremacy of the best Poirot stories over the rest of what she wrote. She became tired of Poirot herself and preferred Miss Marple, who did not appear in a novel until 1930, with the feeble Murder at the Vicarage. Miss Marple, she said, was more fun, and like many aunts and grandmothers was 'a splendid natural detective when it comes to observing human nature'. Only a minority of readers agreed with her. If one prefers Poirot it is not only because he is an altogether livelier character, but also because his insights are more rational and less inspirational than Miss Marple's. A second thing that becomes apparent is her frequent carelessness in leaving deplorably loose ends, and a third is the highly verbal nature of her plotting. It is not just that you don't need to know about ancient artefacts to solve a Christie puzzle, but that you need no specialized knowledge at all…. The basic difference in plotting between her and most detective story writers is that the central clue in almost all of her best books is either verbal or visual. We are induced to give a meaning to something that has been said, or something that has been seen, which is not the true meaning or not the only possible meaning. (pp. 33-4)

Such visual and verbal clues, when they are used with subtlety and fairness, seem to me the very best things in the classical detective story. At her best Dame Agatha Christie was an incomparable deceiver.

That the level of her work varied greatly has to be acknowledged. Most of her finest performances belong to the 1920s and 1930s. The following decade more or less maintained this high level, but after that the decline was steady and near the end it was steep. The books of her last few years were, with only one or two exceptions, no more than faint echoes of her best work. A book like The Clocks (1963) opens very promisingly with a body found in a room full of clocks, most of which have no right to be there. The explanation of this anomaly, which would have been the heart of an earlier novel, is both casual and disappointing. And the people have become shadowy too, as inevitably she lost touch with contemporary life and feeling.

A survey of her whole output shows that she was often slapdash from the beginning in dealing with the technical details from which she flinched. Murder on the Links (1923), for instance, has been justly praised for its complicated and brilliant plotting, and for the way in which details of a twenty-year-old murder are interwoven with a current one. It contains one of her most characteristically clever touches of deception, and what must be called an almost equally characteristic carelessness in handling an important plot detail. (pp. 34-5)

In the end Agatha Christie's claim to supremacy among the classical detective story writers of her time rests on her originality in constructing puzzles. This was her supreme skill, and it is [displayed best] in three books, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The A.B.C. Murders and Ten Little Niggers. Some would add to these, which I regard as her most dazzling performances, Murder on the Orient Express (1934) (in the US Murder in the Calais Coach) or Peril at End House (1932) or even the last Poirot story Curtain (1975). But the crime writer who relies on a puzzle is like a tight-rope walker. A perfect achievement is a perfect marvel, but anything less, any slight swaying on the line, leaves us sharply critical. Both Murder on the Orient Express and Curtain are for me too obviously and purely tricks, and although I rate Peril at End House much more highly than do most critics, it cannot quite be ranked with Christie's best. (p. 35)

The trouble with plot devices is that they often obtrude, so that we have all plot and no story. Part of Roger Ackroyd's triumphant success rests in the fact that the rest of the story is so perfectly typical of the period. (p. 36)

One might feel that ingenuity in plot construction could hardly be taken further than Roger Ackroyd. Rather more than a decade after its publication, Dorothy L. Sayers suggested that the detective story as a pure puzzle was in gentle and painless decline, partly because those devices that had seemed so ingenious in the form's early days—the poisoned toothbrush, the evaporating ice dart, the pistol timed to fire when the grandfather clock in the library struck twelve—were worn out from too much use, and partly because readers' tastes had changed, so that they were increasingly asking for crime stories in which the characters were as important as the plot. She has proved a truthful prophet, although some of the crime story's developments would have surprised and displeased her. Agatha Christie's ingenuity, however, had always been verbal and visual rather than mechanical and scientific, and she responded to the idea that the detective puzzle was worn out by inventing new and still more dazzling conjuring tricks.

Are The A.B.C. Murders (1935) and Ten Little Niggers (1939) as good as Roger Ackroyd? Not quite, because the trick played on the reader is deliberately artificial rather than fitting naturally into the story. In the later books the Christie cleverness again leaves us gasping, but second and third readings show that the plot has been built around the device used, with total disregard for our belief in the story itself. Who can believe that those ten guilty people would in fact have accepted that mysterious invitation to stay on the small island in Ten Little Niggers? Who can believe in a murderer so reckless, and in a gull so stupid, as the characters in The A.B.C. Murders? Yet the books remain triumphs of ingenuity, and it is worth trying to see just how the tricks are done. (pp. 36-7)

What are Agatha Christie's chances of survival as a writer who will be read a century from now?…

To answer yes, as I would do, is not to say that she was a great or even a good writer, but rather to say that although the detective story is ephemeral literature, the puzzle which it embodies has a permanent appeal…. If her work survives it will be because she was the supreme mistress of a magical skill that is a permanent, although often secret, concern of humanity: the construction and the solution of puzzles. (p. 38)

Julian Symons, "The Mistress of Complication," in Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime, edited by H.R.F. Keating (copyright © 1977 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson; reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Publishers; in Canada by Weidenfeld & Nicholson Ltd.), Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977, pp. 25-38.

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