The real mystery about Agatha Christie’s 66 novels, 14 short story collections, films, radio plays, and seemingly endless ITV adaptations is not who stabbed the rich businessman, clobbered the young school teacher or poisoned the blind pensioner but instead why her tales of cold-blooded and often gruesome or violent murder have achieved and maintained such incredible popularity. Where does this tremendous success – at times somewhat surprising given the criticism she’s come up against and the sometimes problematic nature of her writing – come from, and what does it say about us?
Anyone who, like me, has read more than their fair share of Christie classics, will be familiar with the modus operandi her detectives use when facing a mystery like this one. First they inspect the crime scene as a whole (it’s always neatly contained and readily surveyable,) then they gather and examine all the evidence before – after a period of intense uncertainty – revealing all in an overly dramatic finale.
And so, following her tried and tested structure, we need to look at the nature of Christie’s success before we can evaluate its causes. It’s difficult to be exact, of course, about sales, but most sources agree she has sold between two and four billion copies in over 100 languages – a staggering number, and one that, almost unbelievably in my view, makes her the joint best-selling author of all time (sharing the title with Shakespeare). And Then There Were None is one of only eight confirmed works of fiction which has sold over 100 million copies. Her most successful play, The Mousetrap, has been the world’s longest continuously running theatre piece for decades now and her works have inspired countless new detective writers and set industry standards.
But what is it about her stories that has caused people to buy them time and time again? My first sense is that she taps into some macabre fascination with death we hold as a society. Christie exploits the same instinct that causes motorway drivers to slow down to get a good look at the debris from a high-speed collision or tourists visiting Italy to seek out the petrol station in Milan where Mussolini’s corpse was hung. Her books are to civilised, modern society what public hangings were to medieval Britain or what gladiatorial fights were to the Romans. But even if this is true, it doesn’t completely explain her personal success. Christie didn’t invent the genre – The New Yorker credits Edgar Allen Poe with this – and given Arthur Conan Doyle’s success 30 years earlier it wasn’t the case that she had simply stumbled across fertile but previously unsown lands. When Christie started writing shortly after the First World War there was no shortage of detective fiction. Anyone and everybody seemed to be writing crime fiction; the genre was so popular that anyone who wrote stood a good chance of getting published. There needed to be something else to make her stand out.
Maybe, however, she offered a desensitised, cleaner and more tolerable approach to death. Her books are notable for their distinct lack of violence or gore. The majority of her victims are poisoned, and those deaths caused by being shot, stabbed or bashed on the head are disconcerting only in their clinical techniques. Christie found a way to successfully feed our primitive fascinations without any of the irritating moral thoughts civilised society requires of us. She made death easy to read.
The Queen of Crime also made the experience of a murder mystery as a whole less difficult for her readers. Her direct style of writing means reading her works is no chore. She gets criticised for creating one-dimensional characters, figures who lack a background or believability, but I think some of this can be put down to society’s tendency, especially in the world of literature, to view popular fiction as less worthy or as the product of an artist who sells out.
I subscribe to the Orwellian principle that simple writing makes good writing and I find from personal experience that achieving this without sacrifice is often incredibly difficult. Accomplished, celebrated writers also seem to share some respect for her stories. T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion, for example, contains a mystery solved by a character named Agatha, who is likely to be in tribute to Christie.
Often another source of criticism, the formulaic approach Christie takes in nearly every work may in fact be a significant strength. She overloads us with so much information – often seemingly contradictory in nature – and with such pace that confusion and chaos dominate much of the plot. Despite this, the detective seems to know better than both the other characters and the reader. This sense of someone being in control is reassuring (and I would speculate this is the same phenomenon that leads us to sometimes see our presidents, doctors, and others as superior). But it is the promise of an elegant, simple solution at the end regardless of how unlikely it may look that is Christie’s most powerful tool. W.H. Auden once explained that, once he had picked it up, he couldn’t put down a detective novel until he had finished it. In reality, solutions – whether in murder cases or anything else – are rarely so beyond doubt. Like so many other successful writers, Christie crafts a tremendously exciting and satisfying world that could never exist outside the novel.
Sadly, the causes of Christie’s success as a writer are not as clearly identifiable. But, in a distinct parallel to one of her most famous stories, I think it is legitimate to attribute all of the suspects with some responsibility. She wrote in a genre that lent itself to commercial success and popularity, but it took the creation of a certain type of desensitised crime, the development of a very readable style, and knowledge (whether conscious or not) of inherent human nature and our difficult relationship with death to set her apart. I feel Agatha Christie’s contribution to literature is often played down. I am no Christie; I cannot solve the mystery of her success in a neatly-tied bow. But I hope I have at least made the case for more considered thought about our relationship with her.
