thinking about her (can phil express an opinion)

Thoughts on Agatha Christie (the woman/her novels whichever).

Brilliant showstopping spectacular iconic.

Christie could get a bit stereotypical in her characters, and reading them as a person in the 21st century you can see the biases regarding race and gender. Which is sad, and the biggest flaw she has as a writer, in my opinion. It’s also fascinating to me because in other ways she was so fucking astute about human nature - what we observe and what we dismiss, the kind of assumptions we make, what pushes people to violence and murder, why people are cowardly or brave.

I think part of her issue with falling into stereotypes was that Christie was more concerned with the puzzle of her mystery. Compare this, for example, to Dorothy L. Sayers, who used her murders as the backdrop for the journey her main characters were on. The actual crimes perpetrated in Gaudy Night are, if you just list them, not actually all that crazy or extreme. Not to downplay the horrible effects that sending people nasty messages can have, but vandalism and graffiti is not exactly what you’d expect to find as the subject of a mystery novel (although it does escalate to physical attacks and the attempt to drive at least one character to suicide).

Gaudy Night’s crimes start out small and slowly escalate because Sayers was concerned more with using the crimes to start a discussion about feminism and Harriet Vane’s personal journey. The mystery props up the character. Christie, however, was the opposite - she used characters to prop up the mystery.

But dear God, her mysteries. Holy shit.

I have never been stumped by mysteries as I have by Christie. I tend to have to read murder mysteries a certain way - I have to turn off my brain and let myself drift through the story, otherwise I figure out the mystery too soon and I get impatient waiting for the characters to figure it out. Or, something else I’ve noticed, is people writing the mysteries don’t trust themselves. They fear they’ve crafted a story the reader will figure out. So they don’t actually give you all the clues, they scatter them very slowly throughout, so that you don’t really have a chance to solve the mystery by yourself.

But Christie gives you all the clues right away, because she was so fucking confident that even with all those clues in front of you, you wouldn’t be able to put the puzzle together correctly, and she’s fucking right. She’s known as the “Queen of Crime” for a reason. She created or made common a dozen mystery tropes while putting ingenious twists on another dozen. The uproar that happened when The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published was INSANE. I-N-S-A-N-E. *John Mulaney voice* NO ONE could handle it. And Then There Were None has been scaring the pants off adults for decades.

While I prefer Sayers for character development, when it comes to crafting a puzzle, truly, I don’t think anyone beats Christie. She’s been one of my favorite authors for years, and quite a lot of her influence seeps into my writing. She’s not perfect but damn I adore her.