Crime writer Sophie Hannah’s novel, The Monogram Murders, featuring Agatha Christie’s detective Hercule Poirot has just been published and is getting a good reception.
Hannah says reading Christie as a young teenager made her fall in love with mystery fiction. You and me both, Sophie.
The first Agatha Christie novel I read was Death on the Nile, which plunged me into a grown-up world of passion, sex, jealousy, greed, exotic places, even more exotic characters and, of course, murder.
I gasped at the ingenious plot and the clever twist. I marvelled at the audacity with which the author baffled my expectations and assumptions.
This was the gateway novel which had me hooked and made me crave the deeper, darker, more dangerous and psychotic fixes which other crime novelists continue to provide.
Agatha Christie does have her critics but some of the aspects which are derided as outmoded, cosy and bloodless are the qualities which make it enjoyable and are, in fact, characteristics of much crime fiction, classic and so-called edgy alike.
Class structure, snobbery, social divisions
The Christie novels of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s reveal some of the workings of the English class system. The upper classes are there in the form of dukes, duchesses, sirs, ladies and other titled beings.
The middle classes are represented by majors and captains and doctors and vicars and ladies of manor houses in rural areas. Their comfortable lives are serviced by working-class armies of cooks, housemaids, parlour maids, under house parlour-maids, ‘half-witted but amiable’ girls who help out. Everyone knows their place. (The hierarchy and functions of servants actually provide a crucial plot point in the 1934 mystery, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?)
Social position is indicated through references to dress and speech. Those attempting to appear of a higher class are rumbled. ‘A well-bred girl would never turn up at a point-to-point in a silk flowered frock,’ we are told in The Body in The Library (1952). Oh dear.
Closed worlds
Crime fiction works well when it depicts closed worlds where clashes and rivalries between characters are intensified in the hot-house atmosphere of people living and working in close quarters.
The best-known Christie closed world is the village, most notably presented through Miss Marple, whose life in St Mary Mead has given her an intimate knowledge of evil and its perpetrators. Big houses and their inhabitants are the setting for murder, along with coach trips, cruise ships, hotels, boarding houses, schools, clubs, archaeological digs, any place which brings people together and which operates within its own particular rules and conventions.
Contemporary police procedurals bring another layer to this characteristic through their exploration of the tensions and relationships among the investigating team.
The power of observation
In the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, Poirot applied his brain, his ‘little grey cells’, to solve crime. Both he and Miss Marple are readers of people. They notice little inconsistencies in behaviour, they observe patterns and apply reason and logic. They are aware of individuals who deviate from the world view which is the norm (that is to say, theirs).
There is a particular kind of pleasure when a clue to solving the mystery hinges on which word is emphasised in the sentence ‘She wasn’t there’ or in a picture which was askew or in initials read back to front in a mirror.
The same kind of pleasure is to be gained from the TV medical series House or in accompanying Morse on his investigative journeys. The mix of deduction and intuition based on observation is satisfying.
Exploration of human weaknesses
Agatha Christie presents heinous crimes with a light touch.
The focus is on solving a puzzle and there is little emphasis on the victims and not much exploration of the murderer’s psyche. This limited approach is comforting and honest. There are no jarring shifts in viewpoint or attempts to impose layers of significance.
But the books do not lack awareness of the depths of human depravity or understanding of the criminal mind. Poirot warns ‘Do not allow evil into your heart. It will make a home there.’ There is just enough empathy and understanding of the range and nature of human emotion to balance the intellectual exercise of solving a mystery.
Linguistic texture
There are unexpected delights to be found in Christie’s functional prose. Economical descriptions, such as ‘she was a plump woman with a discontented mouth’ and ‘her whole figure had a queer modern angularity that was not, somehow, unattractive’ (The ABC Murders 1936) are very effective.
A whole milieu is summed up in the reference to a world of ‘shabby chintz and horses and dogs’ . The sentence ‘Men didn’t take much notice of her and other girls rather made use of her’ (A Pocketful Of Rye 1953) pinpoints with precision a type of personality which is instantly recognisable, a victim of her own passivity and of people other than murderers.
The tart observation ‘Mr Satterthwaite was in some way a little old-fashioned, so much so that he seldom made fun of his host and hostess until after he had left their house’ (The Mysterious Mr Quin 1930) could come from a weightier work of satire. I like ‘Jerry had an expensive public school education, so he doesn’t recognise Latin when he hears it’, one of several similar barbs in The Moving Finger (1943).
I haven’t read Sophie Hannah’s book yet but says she has a plot twist which she couldn’t work into a contemporary novel but which works in a Poirot-esque story. I can’t begin to think what kind of plot she couldn’t use. Sophie’s psychological thrillers are tautly plotted, tightly written and brilliantly bonkers. I can’t wait.