Why?
I have held this question in my mind as a strong curiosity for many years. I have no doubt that a thousand years from now millions of people will still be reading and watching Agatha Christie stories. At some point the “experts” will be forced to place her in the “great writers of history” list.
Yet her writing, on the surface, seems plain.
It’s not hard to explain why Shakespeare or Tolstoy, Cervantes or Homer should be on the “great writers” list. What I have wanted to know is why this “detective story” writer seems to impact more people than they.
Often, I write in order to learn, not because I know. This article is in that category. My hope is to set out at least a few ideas of why Agatha Christie’s stories are so popular.
Although I have read many of her books, I have watched the television and movie versions far more often. I consider David Suchet’s presentation of Hercules Poirot to be one the best renditions of great literature into cinematography.
Two recent renditions of an Agatha Christie story into a movie might give us what we need to begin to understand the power of her story-telling. I am speaking of A Crooked House and Murder on the Orient Express.
I began to watch a recent version of Murder on the Orient Express, but I stopped about fifteen minutes into it. I have no idea of the rest of the movie primarily because I did not care. In contrast, I have already watched A Crooked House (with Glenn Close) twice, even though it is recent.
Contrasting these two renditions gives me a first point of why Agatha Christie is one of the most effective writers of story in history.
A few minutes into the recent Murder on the Orient Express, I realized that I was not watching Agatha Christie, but someone who imagined himself to be smarter than her. Specifically, the detective had become the “star of the show.”
In A Crooked House, the detective played an entirely different role. In himself, the detective did not stand out. He played his part, but otherwise he was not “interesting,” that is, he did not draw attention to himself by being either too much or too little. Instead, the detective was the “catalyst,” so to speak, a character whose purpose was to showcase all the fascinating personalities in the list of suspects swirling all around him.
It can be said that Agatha Christie’s strength is in the psychology of the mystery. While I recognize that as a fact, I have to know what it means.
By keeping her main character reasonably neutral, Agatha Christie could better display the personality quirks, inhibitions, and especially the motives of all the other characters. More than that, she used the twists of the plot not just to develop the mystery, but also to elicit further fascinating details about the many colorful suspects in the story.
In contrast, when the detective is the “star of the show,” the truly interesting suspects fade into the background and the story is neither interesting nor Agatha Christie.
The use of the main character as a means to showcase all the other characters is but one small reason why Agatha Christie’s stories are so popular.
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Edited
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