I was excited to see a trailer for the new film version of “Death on the Nile.” It’s not only one of my favorite Agatha Christie novels, it stars and is directed by one of my favorite actors, Kenneth Branagh.
Once I calmed down, though, I thought: “What is it with all the Christie stuff?”
In December, I read two newly published novels that featured Agatha Christie as a character: “Death at Greenway,” by Lori Rader-Day, and “Murder at Mallowan Hall,” by Colleen Cambridge.
Both have been nominated for the Agatha Award, which honors books in the Christie tradition: No gratuitous sex, gore or violence. Drugs, of course, abound in Christie’s work. She served as a pharmacy technician in World War I and used her knowledge to fictionally poison the victims in more than half of her novels.
“The Mystery of Mrs. Christie,” by Marie Benedict (2020), was on my to-be-read pile, so it came next. Then I had to read “Dead Man’s Folly,” because that was set at Greenway, Christie’s summer home.
A few days later, I spotted “Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mystery in the Making,” by John Curran, on the returned book cart in the school library where I work.
I took it out.
Then I had to reread Christie’s first book, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” to see how some of the ideas expressed in her notebooks played out.
At that point, I decided I needed to move onto something else.
But then I saw that “The Christie Affair,” by Nina de Gramond, was about to be published. I immediately put a hold on it in the Minerva online catalog.
Whew.
I’ve been reading Agatha Christie since I was an adolescent. My parents were both avid readers of mysteries, although my father was more into hard-boiled and noir (we both loved the works of Ross Macdonald). They subscribed to the “Detective Book Club,” which periodically sent them these plain brown books (with no jacket covers) containing three mysteries by famous authors.
I devoured these as soon as I graduated from Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys and the Happy Hollisters (I owned a complete collection).
The DBC was my first exposure to Christie. My family took a car trip to Florida when I was 13, and we stopped at the tourist-trap extravaganza “South of the Border,” to use the bathrooms and buy fireworks (which were then illegal in Massachusetts). There, on a book stand, was “Halloween Party” by Agatha Christie. I had to have it. My parents, raised during the Depression, were pretty, uh, frugal, but they never said no to a book.
Having my own paperback copy of a Christie with a cool cover (a jack-o’-lantern with a knife sticking out of it) turned me into a fan. I then began reading all her books.
I’ve also watched countless adaptations, with my favorites being the Hercule Poirot series featuring David Suchet and the Miss Jane Marple episodes starring Joan Hickson as St. Mary Mead’s favorite spinster sleuth.
My Uncle Victor, my father’s older brother, was a great reader and Christie fan. He lived in Maryland, but he came home for the holidays; we would always have a serious discussion about the latest Christie. It was only recently that I realized it was a thing—“A Christie for Christmas,” her publishers called the annual release.
When Uncle Vic died, his “Agatha Christie Collection” comprising 30 books in identical blue bindings, went to my mother. She later passed them on to me. They hold pride of place in the living room bookcase.
Yes, I am devoted to the Queen of Mystery, but I still wondered: “Why all the Christie stuff?” She doesn’t have much of a writing style and her characters are shallow. Prejudices of the time periods in which she wrote can be jarring. The title of “Ten Little Indians” was hardly an improvement over the original, totally objectionable title it replaced.
Yet that book was a tour de force, always listed as one of her best. Christie was an impeccable plotter. Her settings, too, draw us in—the Nile, the Orient Express and, of course, the English country manor house.
We love her bumbling colonels, the housemaids who are either profoundly ignorant or wise beyond their station, the dashing bachelors down from London for the weekend, the divorced socialites who are eying other women’s husbands.
We know there won’t be any decapitations, evicerated pets or victims with sewn-together eyelids in the next chapter.
When I had a bad case of the flu around 1990, I dispatched my husband, Paul, to Lithgow Public Library to get me some Agatha Christies. In that pre-Internet era, I had no way of knowing what was on the shelves. I simply croaked, “Bring me some Christies!”
In my hour of need, that was all I wanted to read. All I could read.
Lately I have been despondent over the pandemic, Russia and Ukraine, climate change and crazy anti-vaxxers. So why am I surprised that Dame Agatha seems to be everywhere? It’s just what we need: “A Christie for Covid.”
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