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Works of fiction Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple
Memorial to Christie in central London Christie's first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920 and introduced the detective Hercule Poirot, who became a long-running character in Christie's works, appearing in 33 novels and 54 short stories.[66]
Miss Jane Marple, introduced in the short-story collection The Thirteen Problems in 1927, was based on Christie's grandmother and her "Ealing cronies".[67] Both Jane and Gran "always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and were, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right."[14]:422 Marple appeared in 12 novels and 20 stories.
During the Second World War, Christie wrote two novels, Curtain and Sleeping Murder, intended as the last cases of these two great detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Both books were sealed in a bank vault for over thirty years and were released for publication by Christie only at the end of her life, when she realised that she could not write any more novels. These publications came on the heels of the success of the film version of Murder on the Orient Express in 1974.[citation needed]
Christie became increasingly tired of Poirot, much as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had grown weary of his character Sherlock Holmes. By the end of the 1930s, Christie wrote in her diary that she was finding Poirot "insufferable", and by the 1960s she felt that he was "an egocentric creep".[68]
However, unlike Conan Doyle, Christie resisted the temptation to kill her detective off while he was still popular. She saw herself as an entertainer whose job was to produce what the public liked, and the public liked Poirot.[69]
She did marry off Poirot's companion Captain Hastings in an attempt to trim her cast commitments.[14]:268 In contrast, Christie was fond of Miss Marple. However, the Belgian detective's titles outnumber the Marple titles more than two to one. This is largely because Christie wrote numerous Poirot novels early in her career, while The Murder at the Vicarage remained the sole Marple novel until the 1940s. Christie never wrote a novel or short story featuring both Poirot and Miss Marple. In a recording discovered and released in 2008, Christie revealed the reason for this: "Hercule Poirot, a complete egoist, would not like being taught his business or having suggestions made to him by an elderly spinster lady. Hercule Poirot - a professional sleuth - would not be at home at all in Miss Marple's world.".[67]
Poirot is the only fictional character to date to be given an obituary in The New York Times, following the publication of Curtain. It appeared on the front page of the paper on 6 August 1975.[70]
Following the great success of Curtain, Christie gave permission for the release of Sleeping Murder sometime in 1976 but died in January 1976 before the book could be released. This may explain some of the inconsistencies compared to the rest of the Marple series—for example, Colonel Arthur Bantry, husband of Miss Marple's friend Dolly, is still alive and well in Sleeping Murder although he is noted as having died in books published earlier. It may be that Christie simply did not have time to revise the manuscript before she died.[71]
In 2013, the Christie family gave their "full backing" to the release of a new Poirot story, The Monogram Murders, which was written by British author Sophie Hannah.[72] Hannah later released a second Poirot mystery, Closed Casket, in 2016.[73]
Formula and plot devices[edit source]
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Christie's reputation as "The Queen of Crime" was built upon the large number of classic motifs that she introduced, or for which she provided the most famous example. Christie built these tropes into what is now considered classic mystery structure: a murder is committed, there are multiple suspects who are all concealing secrets, and the detective gradually uncovers these secrets over the course of the story, discovering the most shocking twists towards the end. Culprits in Christie's mysteries have included children, policemen, narrators, already deceased individuals, and sometimes comprise no known suspects (And Then There Were None) or all of the suspects (Murder on the Orient Express).
At the end, in a Christie hallmark, the detective usually gathers the surviving suspects into one room, explains the course of his deductive reasoning, and reveals the guilty party, although there are exceptions in which it is left to the guilty party to explain all (such as And Then There Were None and Endless Night).[74][75]
Christie allows some culprits to escape earthly justice for a variety of reasons, such as the passage of time (retrospective cases), in which the most important characters have already died, or by active prescription. Such cases include The Witness for the Prosecution, Murder on the Orient Express, The Man in the Brown Suit, Elephants Can Remember, and The Unexpected Guest. There are instances in which a killer is not brought to justice in the legal sense but does die as a direct result of his plot, sometimes by his own hand at the direction or with the collusion of the detective (usually Hercule Poirot). This occurs in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Death on the Nile, Dumb Witness, Crooked House, The Hollow, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, Cat Among the Pigeons, Peril at End House, Nemesis, Appointment with Death, The Secret Adversary, and Curtain. In the last of these (Curtain), no fewer than three culprits die during the course of the story.
In The A.B.C. Murders, the murderer has killed four innocent people and attempted to frame an unstable man for the crimes. Hercule Poirot, however, prevents this easy way out, ensuring a trial and hanging. In And Then There Were None, the killer's own death is intrinsic to the plot; the red herring is when and how the killer actually died. However, stage, film, and television productions of some of these mysteries were traditionally sanitized with the culprits not evading some form of justice, for a variety of reasons – e.g., censors, plot clarity, and Christie's own changing tastes. (When Christie adapted Witness for the Prosecution into a stage play, she lengthened the ending so that the murderer was also killed; this format was followed in screen versions, including the Billy Wilder film from 1957.) In Death Comes as the End, set in ancient Egypt, the culprit is killed by one of the few surviving characters before he can claim another victim .
In some stories, the question remains unresolved of whether formal justice will ever be delivered, such as Five Little Pigs and Endless Night. According to P. D. James, Christie often, but not always, made the unlikeliest character the guilty party. Savvy readers could sometimes identify the culprit by simply identifying the least likely suspect.[76]
On an edition of Desert Island Discs in 2007, Brian Aldiss claimed that Christie had told him that she wrote her books up to the last chapter, then decided who the most unlikely suspect was, after which she would go back and make the necessary changes to "frame" that person.[77] However, John Curran's Agatha Christie: The Secret Notebooks describes different working methods for every book in Christie's bibliography, contradicting the claim by Aldiss.[citation needed]
Titles[edit source] Christie's mature novels, from 1940 onwards, often have titles drawn from literature.
Four are from Shakespeare:
Sad Cypress from a song in Twelfth Night: "Come away, come away, death / And in sad cypress let me be laid". By the Pricking of My Thumbs from Act 4, Scene 1 of Macbeth : "By the pricking of my thumbs / Something wicked this way comes". There is a Tide... (later Taken at the Flood) from Brutus' speech in Julius Caesar: "There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune". Absent in the Spring from Sonnet 98: "From you have I been absent in the spring ..." Three are from the Bible:
Evil Under the Sun from Ecclesiastes 5:13 (and restated in 6:1): "There is a sore evil which I have seen under the sun, namely, riches kept for the owners thereof to their hurt". The Burden from Jesus' words: "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me ... For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." (Matthew: 11: 29–30). The Pale Horse from the Revelation of St John (6:8): "I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death ...". Another six are from other works of literature:
The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side from Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot": "Out flew the web, and floated wide/The mirror cracked from side to side/'The curse is come upon me," cried/The Lady of Shalott" The Moving Finger from verse 51 of Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: "The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ/Moves on ..." This, in turn, refers to the Biblical account of Belshazzar's feast (Daniel, chapter 5), which is the origin of the expression "the writing on the wall". The Rose and the Yew Tree from Section V of "Little Gidding" from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets: "The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree/Are of equal duration". Postern of Fate from the poem "Gates of Damascus" by James Elroy Flecker: "Postern of Fate, the Desert Gate, Disaster's Cavern, Fort of Fear/The Portal of Bagdad am I ..." Endless Night from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence: "Some are born to sweet delight / Some are born to endless night". N or M? from the Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer which asks, "What is your Christian name? Answer N. or M."[78] The "N. or M." stands for the Latin, "nomen vel nomina", meaning "name or names". It is an accident of typography that "nomina" came to be represented by "m". In such cases, the original context of the title is usually printed as an epigraph.[79] Similarly, the title of Christie's autobiographical travel book Come, Tell Me How You Live is a quote from verse three of the White Knight's poem, "Haddocks' Eyes" from chapter eight of Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll,[80] and is a play on the word "tell", an archaeological mound.[81]
The title of The Mousetrap is purportedly an allusion to Shakespeare's play Hamlet, in which "The Mousetrap" is Hamlet's answer to Claudius's inquiry about the name of the play whose prologue and first scene he and his court have just watched (III, ii).[82]
Seven stories are built around words from well known children's nursery rhymes: And Then There Were None (from "Ten Little Indians"), One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (from "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe"), Five Little Pigs (from "This Little Piggy"), Crooked House (from "There Was a Crooked Man"), A Pocket Full of Rye (from "Sing a Song of Sixpence"), Hickory Dickory Dock (from "Hickory Dickory Dock"), and Three Blind Mice (from "Three Blind Mice"). Similarly, the novel Mrs McGinty's Dead is named after a children's game that is explained in the course of the novel.
Character stereotypes[edit source] Christie occasionally inserted stereotyped descriptions of characters into her work, particularly before the end of the Second World War (when such attitudes were more commonly expressed publicly), and particularly in regard to Italians, Jews, non-Europeans, and sometimes Americans, the last usually as impossibly naïve or uninformed. For example, she described "Hebraic men with hook-noses wearing rather flamboyant jewellery" in the first editions of the collection The Mysterious Mr Quin (1930), in the short story "The Soul of the Croupier"; in later editions, the passage was edited to describe "sallow men" wearing same.
In The Hollow, published as late as 1946, one of the more unsympathetic characters is "a Whitechapel Jewess with dyed hair and a voice like a corncrake ... a small woman with a thick nose, henna red and a disagreeable voice". To contrast with the more stereotyped descriptions, Christie sometimes showed "foreigners" as victims or potential victims at the hands of English malefactors, such as, respectively, Olga Seminoff (Hallowe'en Party) and Katrina Reiger (in the short story "How Does Your Garden Grow?"). Jewish characters are often seen as un-English (such as Oliver Manders in Three Act Tragedy), but they are rarely the culprits.[83]
Often, she is affectionate or teasing with her prejudices. After four years of war-torn London, Christie hoped to return some day to Syria, which she described as "gentle fertile country and its simple people, who know how to laugh and how to enjoy life; who are idle and gay, and who have dignity, good manners, and a great sense of humour, and to whom death is not terrible."[14]:187
She had trouble with an incompetent Swiss French nursery helper (Marcelle) for toddler Rosalind, and as a result she decided, "Scottish preferred ... good with the young. The French were hopeless disciplinarians ... Germans good and methodical, but it was not German that I really wanted Rosalind to learn. The Irish were gay but made trouble in the house; the English were of all kinds".[14]:327
Non-fiction writings[edit source] Christie published relatively few nonfiction works:
Come, Tell Me How You Live, about working on an archaeological dig, drawn from her life with second husband Max Mallowan The Grand Tour: Around the World with the Queen of Mystery, a collection of correspondence from her 1922 Grand Tour of the British empire, including South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, published posthumously in 1977 Critical reception and legacy[edit source] Often referred to as the "Queen of Crime" or "Queen of Mystery", Agatha Christie is the world's best-selling mystery writer and is considered a master of suspense, plotting, and characterisation.[84][85][86] Some critics, however, have regarded Christie's plotting as superior to her skill with other literary elements. Novelist Raymond Chandler criticised her in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder", and American literary critic Edmund Wilson was dismissive of Christie and the detective fiction genre generally in his New Yorker essay, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?"[87]
In honour of the 125th anniversary of her birth, 25 contemporary mystery writers and one publisher revealed their views on Christie's works. Many of the authors read Christie's novels first, before other mystery writers, in English or in their native language, influencing their own writing, and nearly all still view her as the "Queen of Crime", and creator of the plot twists used by mystery authors. Nearly all had one or more favourites among Christie's mysteries, and find her books good to read now, nearly 100 years after her first novel was published. Several of the authors would be very pleased to have their own novels in print in 100 years. Just one of the 25 authors held with Edmund Wilson's views.[88] Harper Collins also published a souvenir magazine Shocking Real Murders: Behind Her Classic Mysteries.[89]
The Guinness Book of World Records lists Christie as the best-selling novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly 2 billion copies, and her estate claims that her works come third in the rankings of the world's most-widely published books,[5] behind only Shakespeare's works and the Bible. Half of the sales are of English language editions, and the other half in translation.[90] According to Index Translationum, she remains the most-translated individual author – having been translated into at least 103 languages.[6] And Then There Were None is Christie's best-selling novel, with 100 million sales to date, making it the world's best-selling mystery ever, and one of the best-selling books of all time.[7]
In 2012, Christie was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admires.[91][92]
Interests and influences[edit source] Archaeology[edit source] The lure of the past came up to grab me. To see a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint, through the sand was romantic. The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself. —[13]:389[14] Christie had a lifelong interest in archaeology. She met her second husband, Sir Max Mallowan, a distinguished archaeologist, on a trip to the excavation site at Ur in 1930. But her fame as an author far surpassed his fame in archaeology.[93] Prior to meeting Mallowan, Christie had not had any extensive brushes with archaeology, but once the two married, they made sure to only go to sites where they could work together. Christie accompanied Mallowan on countless archaeological trips, spending 3–4 months at a time in Syria and Iraq at excavation sites at Ur, Nineveh, Tell Arpachiyah, Chagar Bazar, Tell Brak, and Nimrud. She wrote novels and short stories, but also contributed work to the archaeological sites, more specifically to the archaeological restoration and labelling of ancient exhibits, including tasks such as cleaning and conserving delicate ivory pieces, reconstructing pottery, developing photos from early excavations which later led to taking photographs of the site and its findings, and taking field notes.[94]
Christie would always pay for her own board and lodging and her travel expenses so as to not influence the funding of the archaeological excavations, and she also supported excavations as an anonymous sponsor.[94] During their time in the Middle East, there was also a large amount of time spent travelling to and from Mallowan's sites. Their extensive travelling had a strong influence on her writing, as some type of transportation often plays a part in her murderer's schemes. The large amount of travel was reused in novels such as Murder on the Orient Express, as well as suggesting the idea of archaeology as an adventure itself.[95]
After the Second World War, she chronicled her time in Syria with fondness in Come Tell Me How You Live. Anecdotes, memories, funny episodes are strung in a rough timeline, with more emphasis on eccentric characters and lovely scenery than on factual accuracy.[14]:1985 From 8 November 2001 to 24 March 2002, The British Museum had an exhibit named Agatha Christie and Archaeology: Mystery in Mesopotamia, which presented the life of Agatha Christie and the influences of archaeology in her life and works.[94]
Use of archaeology in her writing[edit source] Many of the settings for Christie's books were directly inspired by the many archaeological field seasons spent in the Middle East on the sites managed by her husband Max. The extent of her time spent at the many locations featured in her books is apparent from the extreme detail in which she describes them. One such site featured in her work is the temple site of Abu Simbel, depicted in Death on the Nile. Also there is the great detail in which she describes life at the dig site in Murder in Mesopotamia. Among the characters in her books, Christie has often given prominence to the archaeologists and experts in Middle Eastern cultures and artifacts. Most notable are the characters of Dr. Eric Leidner in Murder in Mesopotamia and Signor Richetti in Death on the Nile, while many minor characters were archaeologists in They Came to Baghdad.
Some of Christie's best known novels with heavy archaeological influences are:
Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) – the most archaeologically influenced of all her novels, as it is set in the Middle East at an archaeological dig site and associated expedition house. The main characters include archaeologist Dr. Eric Leidner, his wife, many specialists and assistants, and the men working on the site. The novel is noted most for its careful description of the dig site and house, which showed that the author had spent much of her time in very similar situations. The characters in this book in particular are also based on archaeologists whom Christie knew from her personal experiences on excavation sites. Death on the Nile (1937) – takes place on a tour boat on the Nile. Many archaeological sites are visited along the way and one of the main characters, Signor Richetti, is an archaeologist. Appointment with Death (1938) – set in Jerusalem and its surrounding area. The death itself occurs at an old cave site in Petra and offers some very descriptive details of sites which Christie herself could have visited in order to write the book. They Came to Baghdad (1951) – inspired by Christie's own trips to Baghdad with Mallowan, and involves an archaeologist as the heroine's love interest. Portrayals in fiction[edit source] Christie has been portrayed on a number of occasions in film and television. Several biographical programmes have been made, such as BBC television's Agatha Christie: A Life in Pictures (2004; in which she was portrayed by Olivia Williams, Anna Massey, and Bonnie Wright, at different stages in her life), and in Season 3, Episode 1 of ITV Perspectives: "The Mystery of Agatha Christie" (2013), hosted by David Suchet, who plays Hercule Poirot on television.[96][97]
Christie has also been portrayed fictionally. Some of these portrayals have explored and offered accounts of Christie's disappearance in 1926, including the film Agatha (1979) (with Vanessa Redgrave, in which she sneaks away to plan revenge against her husband), and the Doctor Who episode "The Unicorn and the Wasp" (17 May 2008), with Fenella Woolgar, in which her disappearance is the result of her suffering a temporary breakdown owing to a brief psychic link being formed between her and an alien wasp called the Vespiform. Others, such as Hungarian film, Kojak Budapesten (1980; not to be confused with the 1986 comedy by the same name) create their own scenarios involving Christie's criminal skill.[98] In the TV play, Murder by the Book (1986), Christie herself (Dame Peggy Ashcroft) murdered one of her fictional-turned-real characters, Poirot. The heroine of Liar-Soft's visual novel Shikkoku no Sharnoth: What a Beautiful Tomorrow (2008), Mary Clarissa Christie, is based on the real-life Christie. Christie features as a character in Gaylord Larsen's Dorothy and Agatha and The London Blitz Murders by Max Allan Collins.[99][100] A fictionalized account of Christie's disappearance is the central theme of a Korean musical, Agatha.[101] A young Agatha Christie is depicted in the Spanish historical television series Grand Hotel (2011). Aiding the local detectives, Agatha finds inspiration to write her new novel.