THE MUSIC IMMEDIATELY TRIGGERSa response. The graphics follow. And then there is David Suchet. For 13 seasons, from 1989 to 2013, Poirot provided a comfort blanket for Britain. Such style! Such a world of ease! Agatha Christie is all that is required to conjure up a universe of order and morality, the clarity of reason in the search for safety and renewed stability.
But not if you read the books of the best-selling novelist of all time. There was little such ease in the novels which were, at once, more varied (from Ancient Egypt to anti-Communism), complex and insightful than modern critics might suggest. The novels were also far more interesting than their television adaptations.
Christie’s world is the usual fictional mélange of fact and invention. Whereas science fiction’s inventiveness provides detachment from the factual groundings of the present, detective fiction is very different.
It grounds its imagination in the understanding, by writer and reader alike, of the facts and conventions of the world. Indeed, the crimes in question, their motives and consequences, both reflect these conventions and are a breach of them, the combination producing both understanding and shock.
And so, despite Edith de Haviland’s comment in (1949), about Philip Leonides who “writes books. Can’t think why. Nobody wants to read them. All about obscure historical details,” the crime novel offers a role for the historian. He or she can explain this world and the context for the Great Detective.
