As a huge fan of both her books and the television adaptations of her work, I give a hearty "Hear, hear!" to this defense of Agatha Christie. She may not have been the best writer, but she's sharp and clear and knew how to give cracking good story. If her characters aren't fully rounded and rich, she was extremely deft at quickly sketching out a fully recognizable type in just a few sentences, and one can't say her most famous creations (Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, naturally) aren't wholly vivid and unique. There is also the schadenfreude of seeing murder and deception in even the most genteel of spaces, along with the catharsis of seeing justice done, the wicked punished, and the innocent freed. We also all love a little puzzle, which is what most of her work is.
She is both quintessentially English in her milieu and universal in her incisive portrait of humanity, so she's both exotic and relatable at once. I think her work as a social historian is overlooked. Her long career allowed her to chart England's upper and middle classes from just after WWI, through the Roaring '20s, the rise of fascism, WWII, the postwar era, and into the social upheavals of the 1960s. It's fascinating to read about how radically Britain changed over those decades and how people dealt with those changes. Even in Britain, I bet at least part of her appeal is the insight she gives into a vanished world.
So here's to Dame Agatha: a jolly good author!
(Via Bookslut)
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