They are assembled—maybe eight or nine people—in a small place: a snowbound train, a girls’ school, an English country house. Then—oh no! A body drops. Who did this? And why, and how? Among those gathered, or soon summoned, is a detective, who says that no one should leave, please. He then begins questioning the people concerned, one by one. In the end, he collects all the interested parties and delivers the “revelation”: he names the murderer and the motive and the method. Almost never does the culprit protest. Occasionally, he goes off and commits suicide, but as a rule he confesses (“God rot his soul in Hell! I’m glad I did it!”) and exits quietly, under police escort. Anyone who has ever seen a Charlie Chan movie, or played Clue, or, indeed, read a detective story of the past half century will recognize this scenario, created by Agatha Christie, the so-called Queen of Crime, in the nineteen-twenties.
The detective story was invented by Edgar Allan Poe, though he wrote only four of them before he lost interest. Other writers picked up where he left off, but the first “career” practitioner of the genre who is still important to us today is Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes series appeared from 1887 to 1927. By Christie’s time, at least two conventions had been established. First was the detective’s eccentricity. (Holmes, when he is not chasing a criminal, lies on his couch, felled by boredom and cocaine, shooting bullets into the wall of his study.) A second rule was the absolutely central role of ratiocination. The detective, when he is working, shows almost no emotion. What he shows—and what constitutes the main pleasure of the stories—is inductive reasoning.
Christie, who began publishing detective fiction thirty-three years after Conan Doyle, generally followed these rules, but she elaborated on them, creating the scenario described above—the small place, the interrogations, the revelation—and used it, fairly consistently, in sixty-six detective novels published between 1920 and 1976. According to a number of sources, her books, in the approximately forty-five languages they have been translated into, have sold more than two billion copies, making her the most widely read novelist in history. There is also a continuing output of books about Christie. In the past year, we got two more: “Duchess of Death: The Unauthorized Biography of Agatha Christie” (Phoenix; $25.95), by Richard Hack, who has previously written lives of Michael Jackson and J. Edgar Hoover, among others; and “Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making” (HarperCollins; $25.99), by John Curran, a devout fan. With Christie, then, we are dealing not so much with a literary figure as with a broad cultural phenomenon, like Barbie or the Beatles.
Christie was born in 1890 and grew up in a large house in Torquay, a seaside resort in Devon. Her father, Frederick Miller, had a modest inheritance, and it sufficed. In her 1977 autobiography, published posthumously, Christie describes her father’s day: “He left our house in Torquay every morning and went to his club. He returned, in a cab, for lunch, and in the afternoon went back to the club, played whist all afternoon, and returned to the house in time to dress for dinner.” She adds, “He had no outstanding characteristics.” Her mother, Clara, did have characteristics. She wrote poetry, and she was interested in the soul. During Agatha’s youth, Clara went through Unitarianism, Theosophy, and Zoroastrianism. Agatha adored her, and spent hours poring over her jewelry and ribbons.
When Agatha was a child, she had no companions to speak of. Her sister and brother, Madge and Monty, were more than a decade older. She had no schoolmates, either, because, for the most part, she didn’t go to school. (She taught herself, out of books.) She was paralyzingly shy; even as an adult, she wrote, she could hardly bring herself to enter a shop. Her social world consisted mainly of the family’s three servants. She also communed, for long periods every day, with imaginary companions: kings, kittens, chickens. Enthusiastically morbid, she adored funerals, and often went to put flowers on the grave of her late canary, Kiki. “I had a very happy childhood,” she wrote.
In one respect, it was not happy. When Agatha was five, Frederick was informed that, apparently as a result of mismanagement, there was almost no money left in his estate. He tried to find a job, but, Christie wrote, “like most of his contemporaries”—she means contemporaries of his class—he “was not trained for anything.” He died young (fifty-five) and discouraged. Agatha and her mother soldiered on. Dinner was often rice pudding.
As a young woman, Agatha had no thought of a career. All she wanted was a husband, and when she was twenty-four she got one: the dashing Archie Christie, a member of the Royal Flying Corps. They married just after the First World War began. Archie was then sent off to France; Agatha worked in the dispensary of a makeshift hospital in Torquay. After the war, the couple settled in a London suburb. They had one child, Rosalind. Archie went to work in the City; Agatha began writing novels. It eventually dawned on her that there was something a little wrong with Archie: he was unapologetically self-serving. She quotes him saying, “I hate it when people are ill or unhappy—it sort of spoils everything for me.” As Agatha, in her thirties, lost her youthful looks and became increasingly successful as a writer, he spent more and more time on the golf course.
In 1926, Clara died, plunging her daughter into the kind of sorrow that Archie found so obstructive to his happiness. Agatha moved into her mother’s house, to ready it for sale. Archie visited occasionally. One day, he arrived and told her that he had fallen in love with a woman they knew—Nancy Neele, a good golfer—and that he wanted a divorce. Thereafter, he lived mostly at his club, seeing Neele on weekends. For months, when he was home, Agatha tried to persuade him to change his mind. Then, one night, she got in her car and drove away. It took the police ten days to find her.
What happened, insofar as it could be pieced together later, is that she abandoned her car near a small town in Surrey, about an hour’s drive from home, then took a train to Waterloo Station, in London. There she saw a poster advertising the Hydropathic Hotel, in Harrogate, a spa town in Yorkshire. That night, she travelled to Harrogate, where she checked into the hotel under the name of Theresa Neele. She spent her days reading and shopping and taking walks.
Meanwhile, a manhunt had been launched. The Surrey constabulary, enlarged to five hundred men, combed the downs and dragged the ponds in the area around her abandoned car. When the weekend came, they were joined by a mob of volunteers, plus bloodhounds. Ice-cream venders set up stands to serve the crowd. Most of the major newspapers carried a daily story on the matter. Christie’s fellow-guests at the hotel looked at the photos of her in the papers, but none of them made the connection. Indeed, she later recalled playing bridge with them and discussing the strange case of the missing novelist.
Eventually, a reward of a hundred pounds was offered. Christie liked to go to the hotel’s Palm Court after dinner and listen to the band. After a while, the drummer and the saxophonist recognized her, and they went to the police. The police called Archie; he arrived and stationed himself in the hotel lobby. When Christie came downstairs, he identified her.
A number of theories have been advanced to explain this episode. One is that the disappearance was Agatha’s bid to regain Archie’s affections. According to another scenario, her flight was a way of boosting sales. Finally, it was hypothesized that she had experienced fugue, a form of amnesia in which a person travels to another place and may assume another identity. This last was the explanation that Christie and her family settled on. She claimed to have no recollection of what had happened, and her autobiography says not one word about the incident. If it was a ploy to get Archie back, it failed. (He persuaded Agatha to give him a divorce. He soon married Neele, and they are said to have been happy for the rest of their lives.) But if Agatha’s flight was an effort to get the attention of the public, it was successful. She had produced six detective novels by that time, the last of which, “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” (1926), was extremely popular. That success, in part, was why her disappearance received so much attention. Conversely, her disappearance, with its interesting link to detective fiction, made her a celebrity. Her earlier novels were reprinted, and they sold out.
For people of Christie’s time and class, writing was not an uncommon pastime. Her sister, Madge, had a play produced in the West End long before she did. But why detective stories? Again, this was not a remarkable choice. The period between the First and Second World Wars has been called the golden age of the detective story. Practically everyone who wanted to write had a go at it. Such books were adored by ordinary readers—according to Colin Watson, a historian of the genre, housewives brought them home in the shopping basket—but they were just as popular with educated people. W. H. Auden said that when he picked up a detective story he couldn’t put it down until he had finished it. In T. S. Eliot’s “The Family Reunion,” the mystery is solved by a character named Agatha. The intellectuals didn’t just read detective stories, they wrote them: G. K. Chesterton; C. Day-Lewis; Ronald Knox, the Roman Catholic chaplain of Oxford; S. S. Van Dine, a distinguished Nietzsche scholar. Because the form was so popular, almost any detective novel stood a good chance of getting a contract. That fact was no doubt in Christie’s mind as she went to her desk—Archie’s salary was small. At the start, she was a clumsy writer. But she was able to offer her readers what they wanted, a whodunnit, also called a “puzzle mystery”—a story that is a contest between the author and the reader as to whether the reader can guess who the culprit is before the end of the book.
Though Christie’s novels sometimes have colorful settings—a Nile steamer, an archaeological dig in Mesopotamia—most of them are set in England. The corpse may be discovered in its time-honored location, the library, or it may be stuffed into the cupboard under the stairs, with the tennis racquets. As for the weapon, golden-age mystery writers exercised great ingenuity over this. In the words of Christie’s colleague Dorothy Sayers, victims were brought down by “licking poisoned stamps; shaving-brushes inoculated with dread disease . . . poisoned mattresses; knives dropped through the ceiling; stabbing with a sharp icicle; electrocution by telephone.” Christie was less fanciful. Now and then, the victim is shot or stabbed, and poor Agnes, the one stored with the tennis racquets, has a skewer driven through her brain, but Christie favored a clean conking on the head or—her overwhelming preference—poison. That choice was surely a product of her war work in the dispensary, with its many shelves of potentially lethal drugs. But poison probably appealed to her also because it did not involve assault. Christie disliked violence. When, in her novels, someone starts to look dangerous, her detective does not pull a gun. He doesn’t have a gun. Bystanders may wrestle the malefactor to the ground. In one case, where there are no bystanders, the detective squirts soapy water into the murderer’s face. It works.
The murder that sets the plot in motion is rarely shocking. For one thing, we almost never see it happen. Furthermore, the victim is ordinarily someone with whom we do not sympathize, even when we feel we should. Christie did not mind bumping off a child or two. One is driven off a cliff; one is drowned while bobbing for apples. In “Murder Is Easy” (1939), little Tommy Pierce, the town sociopath—he tortures animals—is among the victims. “I shall never forget Tommy’s face when I pushed him off the window sill that day,” the sweet old homicidal maniac who dispatched him says. Much more often, however, the victim is a rich, nasty old person who enjoys taunting his prospective heirs with the accusation that they wish him dead, so that they can collect their inheritances. He’s usually right. Rather boringly, the most common motive for homicide in Christie is money.
This rule—that Christie’s murders do not touch the heart—admits of one curious exception: the murder that the culprit commits, after the main murder, in order to get rid of someone who knows too much. Here the victim is often a nice or in any case blameless person, and we do witness the crime, or at least its prelude. In “A Murder Is Announced” (1950), Miss Murgatroyd, who knows that Letty Blacklock wasn’t in the dining room when the gun went off, is taking the washing off the line when she hears someone approaching. She turns, and smiles in welcome, obviously to a neighbor. It has started to rain. “Here’s your scarf,” the visitor says. “Shall I put it round your neck?” One shivers.
Christie created two famous detectives: Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. Poirot, formerly a member of the Belgian police force, is retired, but he is willing, occasionally, to interest himself in a case. Poirot’s most obvious characteristic is his dandyism. He dyes his hair; he smokes thin, black Russian cigarettes, often regarded with alarm by those to whom he offers them; he wears pointy patent-leather shoes ill-suited to walking the grounds of the country houses where he must often do his sleuthing. He deplores the English preference for fresh air, thin women, and tea. Poirot says that, in interrogations, he always exaggerates his foreignness. The person being questioned then takes him less seriously, and in consequence tells him more. His Franglais is a treat. “I speak the English very well,” he says proudly.
Miss Marple is the opposite of Poirot. She comes from a sleepy village, St. Mary Mead, and she seems a “sweetly bewildered old lady.” She has china-blue eyes; she knits constantly; nobody thinks anything of her. They should, because she is a steely-minded detective. When she is on a case, she says, she makes it a rule to believe the worst of everyone—in her words, she has a mind “like a sink”—and she reports with regret that experience has confirmed her in this point of view.
Miss Marple presents the inconvenience that, since she is not a professional detective, she cannot interrogate. But, by seeming a dotty old lady, she—like Poirot, with his pointy shoes—tends to be discounted and therefore can get people to say more than they should. Her method is to murmur platitudes. In “A Caribbean Mystery” (1964), we find her at a beach resort, with nothing to do, no homicide in sight. Then she gets the news that Major Palgrave, the old man who has been boring her with recollections of his service in Kenya, died in the night. She goes into action. Here she is, having a little chat with Miss Prescott about Mr. Dyson, a fellow-guest whom she doesn’t like the look of. Miss Prescott speaks:
A Christie story goes more or less as follows. By means of interrogation—or, in Miss Marple’s case, snooping (she does not eschew field glasses)—the investigator determines two things for each suspect. First, did he have a motive? Was he, for example, the victim’s son, and deeply in debt? The second question is whether the person had an opportunity to commit the crime. Where was the impecunious son at the time of the murder?
The answers are rarely definitive. Sometimes, people with motives nevertheless have firm alibis. Conversely, innocent-seeming people may have utterly flimsy alibis. In “Hercule Poirot’s Christmas” (1938), when a young man says that he was in the ballroom, by himself, playing records, while the family patriarch was upstairs having his throat cut, Poirot takes this as an indicator of innocence rather than of guilt. It is, he says, “the alibi of a man who did not know that he would be called upon for such a thing.” Eventually, this man does come under suspicion, but soon the finger points to someone else instead. This mystification game is a standard device of suspense literature, but nobody did it quite like Christie.
She tries to help the reader, or she pretends to. Often, the detective has a confidant, to whom, as with Holmes and Watson, he or she will summarize the findings so far. Detectives who have no one to tell things to will often make a list (which Christie prints) of the evidence for and against each suspect. By such devices, Christie keeps the readers thinking that they will be able to solve the mystery.
Then she begins confusing them further. A classic trick is the red herring. When Violet faints at the mention of Jim’s name, or when Pilar throws her passport out the window, experienced readers know that they should ignore this. It is too showy. But when Poirot notices that, since Roger Ackroyd’s death, a chair has been moved in his study—that is, when the occurrence is trivial but nonetheless mentioned—this is potentially a real clue. Or it may be a red herring, masquerading, by its modesty, as a real clue.
A related subterfuge is the “double bluff.” Here, Christie gives us, near the beginning of the book, an obvious culprit. In “Murder at the Vicarage” (1930), the town vicar arrives home one evening and sees Lawrence Redding, a local painter, running out of the vicarage looking pale and shaken. The vicar then enters his house, goes to his study, and finds the town’s widely hated magistrate, Colonel Protheroe, slumped over the desk, with a bullet in his head. Christie seems to be telling us that Redding is the culprit. But we know her by now, so we say to ourselves that Redding is too obvious—and too obvious too early in the book—and so we cross him off our list. Soon, it seems, we are justified. Redding goes to the police and confesses to the crime. Then Anne Protheroe, the colonel’s wife, confesses, saying that Redding, her lover, was only trying to shield her. But then the suspicion shifts again, and again—until it comes full circle. The murderers, it turns out, were indeed Redding and Anne. Of course, the double bluff may be a triple bluff. In guessing that Christie is fooling us, we can be fooled, as with the red herring.
But, in truth, the guessing that we are asked to do is almost fruitless, because the solution to the mystery typically involves a fantastic amount of background material that we’re not privy to until the end of the book, when the detective shares it with us. Christie’s novels crawl with impostors. Letty is not really Letty; she’s Lotty, the sister of Letty. And Hattie isn’t Hattie. She’s a piece of trash from Trieste, who, with her husband, Sir George, killed Hattie (who was also married to him) and assumed her identity. The investigator digs up this material but doesn’t tell anyone till the end.
In response to protests that the resulting dénouements were unguessable, and therefore “unfair,” Christie replied that the reader should have been able to figure them out. The culprit, she said, was always the most obvious person; he just didn’t seem so. That is a brazen falsehood. In most of Christie’s books, the killer turns out to be a most unlikely person. In one, he is a dead man; in another, a child. In yet another, amazingly, it is Poirot. In one virtuoso performance, all twelve suspects, together, committed the crime. This is not to speak of a more common problem: killers who are likable people, and whom, therefore, we don’t suspect. I read all sixty-six of Christie’s detective novels, and I guessed two of the culprits. I’ll bet that this is a fairly typical record.
How did Christie come up with these ingenious plots? In John Curran’s recently published “Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks,” the notebooks in question are school exercise books in which Christie worked out her plots. In many, some pages had already been used. In one, her daughter had done her penmanship practice; in another, the family had recorded their bridge scores. But Christie was a thrifty woman, and she used the remaining blank pages to work out her plots. She made lists of possible victims, culprits, and M.O.s. Then she picked the combinations that pleased her. Curran thinks that this shows the fertility of her imagination; I think it shows her willingness to work by formula, and thereby to forgo depth in favor of the puzzle. If she had given her characters any psychological definition, we could have solved the mystery. But as long as they are kept suspended, opaque—as they must be, in order for the book to be a puzzle—any one of them could be the culprit.
This practice exposed her to the contempt of some critics. Edmund Wilson wrote of detective stories, “I finally got to feel that I had to unpack large crates by swallowing the excelsior in order to find at the bottom a few bent and rusty nails.” The same point is actually made by Christie, via Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, a recurrent character who is a detective-story writer. “When it all comes out,” Mrs. Oliver says, the killer “seems, somehow, so inadequate. A kind of anticlimax.” If a character isn’t interesting, who cares if he killed Colonel Protheroe?
What we get instead is not just a puzzle but a comedy. When characters are informed of a murder, they tend to say things like “Very unpleasant” or “Most distressing for you, Elspeth.” That may sound like standard post-Wildean wit, but Christie can work it up into lovely scenes. In “4:50 from Paddington” (1957), a decomposing corpse has been found in the barn of a great estate. The family’s grandson, Alexander, is home from school on vacation, with a friend. The two boys, thrilled by the news, come tearing up to the barn on their bicycles in the hope of seeing the body. The policeman at the door says no. Alexander pleads:
The murderers, too, are funny. One of them worries that he may botch the job of eliminating his chosen victim, so he kills someone else first—the town rector!—to practice.
A year after Christie’s divorce from Archie, she went on a trip to the Middle East and visited the famous dig at Ur, in Iraq. There she met an archeologist, Max Mallowan, whom, soon afterward, she married. She was thirty-nine. Mallowan was fourteen years younger, but he saw no impediment. He was an intelligent and easygoing man, and it was an affectionate marriage. For years, Christie went with him on digs in Iraq and Syria, countries that she came to love. At most of these outposts, a writing room was erected for her. She was also given responsible jobs to do, removing dirt from the relics (she used facial cleanser) and photographing them. At night, the whole team dressed for dinner, and the cooks produced nice things, like walnut soufflés.
Max and Agatha made this yearly migration until 1960. In his later years, Max held a chair at the University of London; then he was elected a fellow at All Souls, Oxford. Christie, of course, grew old sooner than he. In her memoir she depicts herself as “thirteen stone”—a hundred and eighty-two pounds—“of solid flesh and what could only be described as ‘a kind face.’ ”
Some people say that Christie’s shining period was her middle years. I find that she wrote her best books, in alternation with her worst books, until near the end. She was not a great writer, and some of her admirers, including Janet Morgan—in the authorized biography—say that she wasn’t even a particularly good writer. I disagree. She could produce a bad book, and when she did she usually knew it. Halfway through “Death Comes as the End” (1944), she wrote to Max that she was “despondent about it.” (This is indeed her worst detective novel.) But, from the beginning, she was perfectly fitted to her genre. Not only were her plots tight but she wrote excellent, natural dialogue. As the years passed, she developed a good feel for detail. In one book, the Bishop of Westchester, meeting Miss Marple in a hotel lobby, has a sudden memory of his childhood, in a Hampshire vicarage. He remembers himself calling out, “Be a crocodile now, Aunty Janie. Be a crocodile and eat me.” The vision flashes, then vanishes.
When Christie was in her mid-forties, however, she began to weary of writing. For a long time, she had been averaging at least one novel a year. She felt like a “sausage machine,” she said. She now described Poirot as an “ego-centric creep.” Like Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, she tried to eliminate him, but the fans, and hence the publishers, protested. She also lost her taste for sin, perhaps because of the Second World War, next to which her little murders may have seemed to her frivolous. Wickedness, she says in a novel of 1961, has “no black and evil splendour.”
As she lost interest in fiction, she turned to drama—and then to film and television—for which she adapted her novels and stories. But much of the time, in her late years, she didn’t want to do any writing at all. She drafted her books, Janet Morgan writes, “in interludes between other occupations—gardening, cooking, outings, helping Max—and she would willingly abandon a chapter for a walk.” You can tell. The characters get thinner; the pacing slackens; some of the plots are preposterous. (In one, a house labors under a Gypsy curse.) Eventually, delirium set in. She died in 1976, at eighty-five.
In her last years, ironically, she became more and more popular. Her books, even in hardcover, sold between forty and fifty thousand copies in their first few weeks of publication. She received the C.B.E. in 1971. The Nicaraguan government put Poirot’s face on a postage stamp.
For today’s readers, one pleasure of Christie’s books is her portrait of the times: the period between the two world wars and, above all, the changes that took place after the second war. Her people are upper middle class or, sometimes, upper class. They gaze with astonished disgust at housing developments and supermarkets. They complain bitterly about how heavily they are taxed and how they can no longer afford to maintain the grand houses they saw as their birthright. Eventually, they sell these huge piles to the nouveaux riches. (Christie’s own home in Devon, a lovely Georgian house on the River Dart, was turned over to the National Trust in 2000.) In a wonderful scene, a visitor to the apartment of an old major sees large rectangles of high polish on the parquet. That is where the Oriental rugs were that the major has just been forced to sell.
Social inequality seems to have meant nothing to Christie, or to most other golden-age detective novelists. Julian Symons, in his “Bloody Murder,” an erudite and witty history of the detective story, sums it up: “The social order in these stories was as fixed . . . as that of the Incas.” On the other hand, if we consider Christie within the context of her time and social class, she was a proto-feminist. Miss Marple is far from the only plucky female investigator in her novels. And though Poirot is allowed to make condescending remarks about women (“Women are never kind”), such comments, like his pointy shoes, are part of her satire of his silly, Frenchy ways. Furthermore, his aspersions are as specks compared with Christie’s portrayal of the difficulty of being a woman. “I always had brains, even as a girl,” one of her old ladies says. “But they wouldn’t let me do anything.” (She is the one who pushed Tommy Pierce out of the window.) Another woman, accused of being a gold-digger, answers, “The world is very cruel to women. They must do what they can for themselves—while they are young. When they are old and ugly no one will help them.”
Racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia turn up constantly in Christie’s books. In one, a hostess serves a special dessert called Nigger in His Shirt (chocolate pudding covered with whipped cream). We also get dagos, wogs, and Eye-ties. Most frequently commented on, however, are the Jews. In an early novel, “The Secret of Chimneys” (1925), Herman Isaacstein, who is, of course, a financier with a big nose, is invited to a political meeting at a country estate. When the host, Lord Caterham, is told who Isaacstein is, he says, “Curious names these people have.” Caterham starts calling him Nosystein. The others take this up and shorten it to Nosy.
The treatment, then, is intended as comic. It is part of Christie’s satire, from book to book, of her countrymen: their obsession with their gardens and their dogs; their stiff upper lips; their cucumber sandwiches; their inimitable village names (Much Deeping, Chipping Somerton). After the Second World War, some readers, especially Americans, were not amused by her characters’ views on ethnic difference. Christie’s publishers received letters, including one from the Anti-Defamation League. Her agent probably figured that such letters would seem ridiculous to her. In any case, he didn’t forward them to her. He simply gave Dodd, Mead, her American publishers, permission to delete any potentially offensive references to Jews or Catholics. She apparently didn’t notice the changes.
Some people have come up with subtle explanations for Christie’s popularity and for the general enthusiasm for the detective novel in her time. Auden thought that the fundamental appeal was religious. At least in Protestant countries, he wrote, the solution of the crime vicariously relieves our guilt, restores us to innocence. Others have said that the solace is political. The interwar years were marked by terrible political upheaval. The detective story may have reassured people that disruptive forces lay not in the social order but just in one bad person, who could be removed. According to John Cawelti, in “Adventure, Mystery, and Romance,” a probing history of the detective story, the genre is still doing that duty. Another proposal is that the loss and the recovery are literary—that readers of the twenties onward, assaulted by modernism, were grateful to find in detective literature sentences with subjects and predicates, and stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Borges said that after you read a detective novel other fictions seem to you shapeless. At bottom, all these arguments are the same: the appeal of the detective story is the restoration of order.
Miss Marple doesn’t quite agree. Or, in her view, order is restored only till the next time. She says that since the Second World War you don’t know who your neighbors are, but she doesn’t really believe that there’s a cause of modern unease. “You could blame the war (both the wars),” she thinks, “or the younger generation, or women going out to work, or the atom bomb, or just the Government—but what one really meant was the simple fact that one was growing old.” As for crime, she seems to think that it’s been around forever, and that small, stable communities offer no protection. “One does see so much evil in a village,” she says. She enjoys describing the poisonings, clubbings, rapes, stickups, and so on that have occurred in St. Mary Mead. This is comical, and the comedy is there, as the theorists have claimed, to tame evil. But always, in Christie, there is a melancholy note, a skepticism. In “The Body in the Library” (1942), the body belongs to Ruby, a dance instructor in a hotel. She has been strangled with the satin waistband of her party dress. “She may, of course, have had some remarkable qualities,” a police commissioner says of the girl. “Probably not,” Miss Marple answers. ♦
