Soft-Boiled Eggs vs. Hard-Boiled Eggs

2011_7_11 Soft Boiled vs. Hard Boiled

Agatha Christie is probably the best known and most popular Mystery writer of the Anglo Saxon world in the 20th Century. I don’t think there is much dispute about that. She is Queen of the Genre in that taste sphere.

But her stories, so utterly dependent on a fixed formula, have never appealed to me. I see them as Victorian parlor games, not serious or believable crime fiction. For someone who reads and admires Raymond Chandler, James Cain, James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, and of late, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson, one has to smile indulgently at Christie’s work. To think that Jane Marple, a sweet little old lady, could outfox both the killers and the police, well, if you believe that you probably still believe if Fairies, too. Her stories are such bald contrivances and filled with such British stereotypes from the War years I find it impossible to take them seriously. If you like soft-boiled eggs, this is your author.

Now it is true that all mystery novels are puzzles to one degree or another, but Christie’s stories are nothing but a puzzle to be solved and otherwise short on reality. They may be cute and clever within their time period, but hard-boiled fiction is vastly more popular today. Today’s fictional sleuths are more procedurally orientated, more tough-minded, cynical, and gritty, and often they can be damaged goods, like Kurt Wallander and Dave Robicheaux. We seemed to have more respect and liking for the PI or Detective who stalks our ‘Mean Streets’ and occasionally is capable of being a ‘Dirty Harry’ in order to get the bad guys. It’s more a rough trade than a genteel pastime. Harry Bosch can be scary at times, but once he gets a scent he’s relentless. In Mankell’s THE MAN FROM BEJING it opens with the slaughter of 17 elderly Swedes. The murder scene is am orgy of blood and detached limbs. Both Hercules Poirot and Miss Jane Marple would barf at such a scene. It would take more then what they had to offer. The world as we know it is a very violent place and murder as a parlor game no longer does the job. Our sense of reality demands more. The unbelievable success of THE MILLINIUM TRILOGY points to crime novels as more sociological and political commentaries. There seems to be developing a greater appetite for broader subject matter in a crime novel, which was certainly the case with Dostoevsky’s best work. There is also a craving for a studier individualism that can stand up to oppressive Security Services. LizBeth Salander is Wonder Woman for the 21st century. Her creation was one of Larsson’s boldest inventions. Her antics and immoveable resistance to older men who wanted to do her harm thrilled me.

All this is but a prelude to some remarks I would make about a 2004 biopic I saw about Agatha Christie last Saturday night. Olivia Williams plays Christie in her youth and Anna Massey plays her as an old woman. Massy shows up at the beginning and end of the film. When older she is shy, reserved and doesn’t like interviews. The middle section of the film deals with the great mystery of her middle years: her strange disappearance for 11 days. Local authorities had search parties out day after day. People volunteered to help with the search. Newspapers covered the story every day and reporters hounded Christie’s husband, Archie. One thing he did not mention to the police or the reporters was the day she disappeared was the day he had asks her for a divorce. This is what happened: she had thrown some clothes in a suitcase and driven off in the family car, when she had a minor accident with the car, banging her head against the steering wheel. That blow plus the emotional trauma of the pending divorce was too much for her; she slipped into a dissociative state, with amnesia and completely forgetting whom she was. She ended up in a hotel in a nearby town where she stayed for the duration, until a chambermaid recognized her and called a reporter. When her husband showed up to take her home she did not recognize him, which prompted him to find a psychologist to work with her. There are many scenes in the movie with her working with the doctor, who gradually, step by tiny step, brings her back to herself. Slowly the trauma recedes and she considers writing again and at 38 marries again, an archeologist she had met named Max Mallowan, someone she had worked with on a dig in the Middle East. She had a more professional attitude about her writing afterward, and by professional she meant she was quite conscious of how much money she could make. A good portion of it went into her husband’s work. They were married for 46 years and she wrote a total of 80 books. One a year she says in the movie but it had to be more than that unless she started as a toddler. She died in 1976 at age 85. Altogether she sold 4 billion books, in England second only to Shakespeare.

Hercule Poirot, the Belgian dandy who thinks well of himself, was featured in the first 33 books. When she tired of him she switched to the spinster Miss Jane Marple, who appears in 47 books. Late in her life she was asked why she hadn’t combined her two sleuths in one book. Keeping in mind what I said earlier about the nonsense of an elderly spinster helping the professionals on the job she said: ” Hercule Poirot, a complete egotist, would not like being taught his business or having suggestions made to him by an elderly spinster.”

Amen!