Mrs Agatha Mallowan, whose second marriage was to an archaeologist, believed that writing crime stories was similar to archaeology because it implied "digging" down into the human psyche. September 15 marks 120 years since the birth of the prolific British writer Agatha Christie who published at least one, and sometimes two or three novels a year during her lifetime. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie is one of the best-selling writers of all time, alongside William Shakespeare and the Bible; she is also the most translated individual author, with her books published in over 50 languages.
Even those who have never read Christie, born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, must have come across her works in some form at least once. TV channels are constantly broadcasting shows based on her novels and plays, including screen versions starring Peter Ustinov, Vanessa Redgrave, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor and Tony Curtis and TV series featuring Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.
Mark Twain once wrote "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." But Christie's novels are still read worldwide and studied with ardor by literary experts.
True, rather than evolve throughout her career, her style remained practically unchanged; all her books virtually follow a single pattern. Her readers are happy to forgive these trifles as they follow the untiring narrator along the winding paths of the human psyche. So what is the secret of her hypnotic writing? Multiple studies have been written and false claims made. The Universities of London, Birmingham and Warwick have conducted linguistic analyses of her books and concluded that Christie used neuro-linguistic programming techniques, although NLP was invented only later. Biochemical theories suggested that reading Christie's novels caused the secretion of serotonin, the so-called happiness hormone.
Scotland Yard detectives said her books helped them investigate murder cases through their description of a murderer's psychology. Her experience as a pharmacist gave her detailed knowledge of poisons; her description of thallium poisoning once helped solve a case that had baffled doctors.
Whatever techniques she used, she indeed toyed with her readers as a cat with a mouse, capturing their attention only to let them go before again building the suspense and manipulating the readers right through to the end. In fact advertising and PR professionals studied Christie's novels in a serious attempt to isolate her magic recipe for hypnotizing her consumers (readers).
With her almost Victorian image, Dame Agatha was a quintessential Englishwoman from a good family. She devised her plots while knitting and rarely relied on her notebooks, which she filled with her sloppy handwriting and poor spelling. Agatha never went to school and learned how to read words before syllables - hence her misspellings. Her notebooks contained puzzles, shopping lists and excerpts from crime reports that she used as material for her novels.
As a child, she preferred crime reports to fairy-tales. The quiet girl imagined that she was surrounded by the people mentioned in them. She developed a vast array of phobias which she later exploited in her novels.
In 1926, Agatha quarreled with her husband, Archie, whose last name she kept as her pen name even after their divorce, disappeared from her home and was not found for eleven days. She was eventually identified as a guest in a hotel. She must have fled her trauma and registered there under a different name. Opinions were divided as to whether she had amnesia, or whether she went into a trance, or even whether she sought to avenge her husband's infidelity by trying to trick the police into thinking he had killed her. Later Agatha fed that painful experience into her work.
Her famous characters, Marple and Poirot became experts in the human psyche thanks to their author's depth of insight. She was like Cesare Lombroso, a criminologist and phrenologist in literature. She had a fairly good knowledge of physiology after working as a nurse during World War I.
After publishing her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920, as part of a bet with her sister who was also a writer, Christie became a veritable crime story factory. She developed her typical plot featuring a dead body, the appearance of a detective, a false trail and the final solution of the mystery. Then she poured her ideas into this mold, eventually producing 60 crime novels, six psychological novels (under a different pen name), 19 collections of short stories and other works she co-authored. The incredible volume of her writing suggests graphomania. She said she would have written even if nobody except her husband had ever read her books.
She said that back then, people did not read crime stories to enjoy the violence or the suffering of the victims. She insisted they were morals stories and tried to reward her readers by showing compassion to the victim and retribution to the criminal at the end. The only known exception to the rule was Murder on the Orient Express (1934) in which the perpetrators were partly justified.
Agatha Christie is the inspiration for James Hadley Chase, George Simenon and Daphne du Maurier, she is also the literary "grandmother" of the horror story writer Stephen King, and for some Russian female authors - Alexandra Marinina, Polina Dashkova and Darya Dontsova. She was certainly thrilled by the success of her books. Although she wrote in a "lower" or populist literary genre, her talent and taste elevated it.
She was certainly fishing for compliments when she feigned ignorance as to why her stage-play The Mousetrap had such a long run: it opened in 1952 and since then has run continuously in the West End of London.
She understood that she had become a living symbol of England, and that she was part of her country's heritage. In 1956, Christie was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire), and in the 1971 New Year Honours she was given the equivalent of a knighthood, when she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of her many literary works.
John Curran, a British expert on Christie, has recently made a surprise discovery about her. It emerged that Agatha Christie's work during the 1930's included a piece critical of Hitler's dictatorship called The Capture of Cerberus, which was part of a cycle based on the Labors of Hercules including the Nemean lion, the Lernaean Hydra and the Augean stables.
The story languished in the Christie's attic and was never published. Curran was browsing through her papers when he made this discovery, just as Christie herself once helped her husband on his archaeological digs, revealing her previously unknown utopian political tract and published it. It appeared that this writer for all her nuanced understanding of human psychology, was naive enough to believe that even a dictator could be redeemed by the Christian idea of love.
Agatha Christie died in 1976, eleven years after she thanked God for her good life and love in her autobiography. Readers are still excited by her books including And Then There Were None, Evil Under the Sun, Death on the Nile and even play computer games based on her novels.
Olga Sobolevskaya, RIA Novosti commentator
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
