[This is Kirk Woodward's third guest post since August, after "Stephen Schwartz" on 2 August and his half of "The Originalist Squared" (paired with my own report) on 7 August. My friend now returns with a discussion of Agatha Christie, the great mystery writer, that combines two of Kirk's strongest interests: mystery novels and theater. (To remind ROTters, Kirk's an actor, director, playwright, and acting teacher, but he's had an abiding interest in mystery stories and their authors for many decades. Readers will recall that I posted on ROT a three-part examination of Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason novels on 19 and 22 February and 19 March 2018.)
["Agatha Christie: Dramatist" is Kirk's look at the Grande Dame of mystery writing, the creator, among other memorable figures, of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, as a writer of dramas--not necessarily plays, or not only plays, as we'll see--but as a dramatist in the composition of her novels and stories. I'll let Kirk give you his thesis--he does it better than I could anyway. And it's his gig. ~Rick]
Talk about best-selling books and you have to talk about Agatha Christie. According to some accounts, her works are outsold only by the Bible and the plays of William Shakespeare. She is said to have written books that have sold some two billion volumes, most of them murder mysteries. “An Agatha Christie” is a generic name for a mesmerizing, forward-driven mystery that you can’t put down and that will probably have a twist or a double solution at the end that will astonish you.
Christie, who was born in 1890 and died in 1976, was astonishingly prolific. She would be famous if she’d only written three or four books – say, for example, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The A. B. C. Murders (1936), and And Then There Were None (1939). (If you don’t know why these four books are celebrated, I recommend you read them at once.)
As it is, over her long career she wrote altogether seventy-five novels, mostly murder mysteries, but also several romances (under the name Mary Westmacott). She also wrote 165 short stories, seven radio and television plays, and three volumes of poetry, plus two autobiographies and a travel book, and she found time to participate in a number of archeological digs with her second husband, the archeologist Max Mallowan (1904-1978).
No one doubts that Christie was highly skilled at the craft of writing mysteries. For some, however, the praise stops there. For example, the esteemed mystery writer P. D. James (1920-2014) said of Christie that Christie “wasn’t an innovative writer and had no interest in exploring the possibilities of the genre.” James called Christie “a literary conjuror who places her pasteboard characters face downwards and shuffles them with practiced cunning,” concluding that “perhaps her greatest strength is that she never overstepped the limits of her talent.”
James surely overstates her case. There are I suspect few who would agree with the statement that Christie had not expanded the genre without a great deal of amplification. However, her attitude toward Christie is common. It was most famously laid out by the literary critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) in his essay “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” (1945) in which he wrote that
her writing is of a mawkishness and banality which seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot become interested in the characters, because they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader's suspicion. . . .
Mrs. Christie, in proportion as she is more expert and concentrates more narrowly on the puzzle, has to eliminate human interest completely, or, rather, fill in the picture with what seems to me a distasteful parody of it. In this new novel [Death Comes as the End, 1945], she has to provide herself with puppets who will be good for three stages of suspense: you must first wonder who is going to be murdered, you must then wonder who is committing the murders, and you must finally be unable to foresee which of two men the heroine will marry. It is all like a sleight-of-hand trick, in which the magician diverts your attention from the awkward or irrelevant movements that conceal the manipulation of the cards, and it may mildly entertain and astonish you, as such a sleight-of-hand performance may. But in a performance like Death Comes as the End, the patter is a constant bore and the properties lack the elegance of playing cards.
Well now! It is astonishing that anyone would read such a weak literary product as Wilson describes. Wilson of course is unimpressed with the whole genre of mystery writing, but he certainly has little admiration in particular for Christie. What can we say about such disdain for such a popular writer?
The answer, I believe, is a simple one: one sees what one is looking for. Wilson criticizes Christie for not being a novelist in the same sense that Jane Austen, Henry James, or Phillip Roth are novelists. However, Christie’s books do not aim at accomplishing the same things that such writers’ works accomplish. That is because, in a very real sense, she is not a novelist at all. She is a dramatist.
Christie was in fact quite literally a highly skilled playwright. She wrote sixteen plays. They are well constructed, almost all have been staged multiple times, and several of them have been enormously successful. In fact Christie’s play The Mousetrap opened in London in 1952 and is still running, making it the longest running play of all time, heading steadily toward 30,000 continuous performances.
Other notable plays by Christie include Witness for the Prosecution (1953), based on one of her short stories and subsequently turned into a notable 1958 movie, and And Then There Were None (1943). I have seen a production of her own dramatization of Murder on the Nile (1945) and found it a most satisfactory mystery.
However, I am not only claiming that Christie wrote plays, but that she writes her books as a dramatist. What does that mean?
In the first place, it means, quoting one of the earliest and most important pieces of drama criticism, the Poetics of Aristotle (384-322 BC), that “the plot is the soul of the drama.” It is no secret that in Christie’s mysteries, and in most of the books of her time now referred to as “Golden Age mysteries,” the stories are plot-driven.
(The mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey written by Dorothy Sayers, who lived from 1893 to 1957, stand out in their time period because they are more character-driven than Christie’s books. Sayers, however, in my estimation is primarily a novelist.)
Edmund Wilson criticizes Christie for exactly the same plot-driven nature of her books that propels the drama. (It may be unfair to note that Wilson wrote plays, none of which are known or celebrated today.) Christie, I suspect, would not apologize. A born dramatist, she would maintain that plot comes first. Not at all coincidentally, plot is the primary element her readers read her books for.
A second element of Christie’s nature as a dramatist is that in her work, character is subordinate to plot. That is not to say that character does not matter; in fact Christie is something of a moralist in her writing. It is also not to say that character in a drama should be uninteresting; obviously it should not. But it does mean that character is subordinate to story. The purpose of drama is not to describe character, but to present it through the plot.
Eric Bentley writes in his superlative book The Life of the Drama (1964) that
In principle, the drama presents human relationships – the things that [people] do to each other – and nothing else. Other things are not presented on stage but, if “there” at all, are merely implied. . . . When we see a play, what is it we see? Possibly against a pictorial background, we watch people encountering each other. This, and, in principle, nothing else: if, say, acrobatics are added, it is strictly as an extra – or as a more demonstrative mode of encounter.
A true novelist is allowed to add, in Bentley’s suggestive word, “acrobatics” at any time in a book. A dramatist is not. Plot is primary for the dramatist, and although the plot is made up of the actions of people caused by their character and motivation, those actions must be embodied in the plot.
A third significance of the idea that Christie is a dramatist is that her scenes are written in the same way that a dramatist writes a scene in a play. That is to say, there is a setting, clearly defined; the scene is related in some way to the previous scene, and involves tension between characters, and it points toward the next scene. To put it more simply, in a Christie book or story you always know where you are and what is happening.
Here is part of a short scene from one of Christie’s works, chosen at random:
POIROT: There is something about this letter, Hastings, that I do not like . . .
HASTINGS: You think – what?
(POIROT shakes his head, picks up the letter, puts it away.)
If you really take it seriously, can’t you do something?
POIROT: As always, the man of action! But what is there to do? The county police have seen the letter but they, too, do not take it seriously. There are no fingerprints on it. There are no local clues as to the possible writer.
HASTINGS: In fact there is only your own instinct?
POIROT: Not instinct, Hastings. Instinct is a bad word. It is my knowledge – my experience – that tells me that something about that letter is wrong – (Shakes his head) I may be making the mountain out of the anthill. In any case there is nothing to be done but wait.
HASTINGS: Well, the 21st is Friday. If a whacking great robbery takes place near Andover then –
POIROT: Ah, what a comfort that would be!
HASTINGS: A comfort? A robbery may be a thrill but it can hardly be a comfort!
POIROT: You are in error, my friend, you do not understand my meaning. A robbery would be a relief since it would dispossess my mind of the fear of something else.
HASTINGS: Of what?
POIROT: Murder.A playwright looks in envy at this scene – but it is from a mystery novel (The A. B. C. Murders. I have removed everything but the dialogue), not a play. We see that with great economy the significance of the letter expands from moment to moment, from what an actor would call one “beat” (a section of a scene) to the next, ending in a climax that sends the reader – the audience? – straight ahead to the next scene.
This scene illustrates a fourth point about the dramatic nature of Christie’s work, namely, the quality of the dialogue. Christie’s books are “dialogue books.” As a result they are easily adapted into TV series and movies – and Christie’s dialogue is often more effective than the later inventions of screenwriters.
Note the smooth touch at the beginning of the scene, where Poirot’s fears about the letter are not spoken, and the subject changes instead to the question of what can be done about a threat that has not yet been spelled out. Three subjects of discussion contribute to the action of the scene – namely, the police, Poirot’s “instinct,” and the possibility of robbery – before the real subject, murder, is finally, chillingly made explicit. This is splendid, masterful dialogue writing.
I submit, then, that Christie does not satisfy Edmund Wilson’s tastes because she is writing what she intends to write rather than what he wants her to. She is fundamentally a dramatist and writes like one.
Why, then, did she write novels and short stories, and not just plays? Because a novel is not limited by what have become known, after Aristotle, as the unities of time and place. A play is limited to a certain number of characters and a necessarily limited number of settings; a novel can travel from place to place, introducing characters as it goes. Christie uses this freedom, but always in service of the drama she is writing.
I have tried to describe one aspect of Agatha Christie’s writing. Obviously there are many more, and other writers continue to explore them. I will only mention one more, along the same lines we have been discussing.
Christie is an entertaining writer. She has an adventurous mind, and she is often funny. One of her sources of humor is what an actor would call “breaking the fourth wall,” in other words, communicating with her audience in a way that exceeds the normal limits of her story.
For example, in the novel Dead Man’s Folly (1956), we read the following, spoken by a character in the book:
After all, if Hattie were alive, she couldn’t possibly conceal herself successfully with the whole of the Press and the police looking for her. Even if something like loss of memory had happened to her, well, surely the police would have found her by now?
One more example of “breaking the fourth wall” comes from The A. B. C. Murders:
“Shouldn’t wonder if you ended by detecting your own death,” said Japp, laughing heartily. “That’s an idea, that is. Ought to be put in a book.”
“It will be Hastings who will have to do that,” said Poirot, twinkling at me.
Readers of Christie’s books will understand the significance of that suggestion; Christie used that same idea in a novel written in the 1940’s but published later.
One of the major principles of criticism is that the critic must understand the intention of a work before moving on to judging it. Agatha Christie’s work has particular intentions, and must be judged on how well it satisfies those intentions. Her intentions lie in the world of drama, and she fulfills them well. Playwrights take note!
[When Kirk suggests above that "readers of Christie's book" will "understand the significance" of the notion that Hercule Poirot could "detect" his own death, he explained that he "was trying to insert a little mystery of my own." I promised I wouldn't reveal more than he wanted to say—so I won't.
[When he discusses why Christie wrote novels instead of plays, I wondered if he hadn't also suspected that she chose novels because it's easier to get a book published than it is to get a play produced. There are fewer people involved in the process of publishing a book than in getting a play on the stage as well. Assuming both the book and the play have some quality, I'd think the writer could make more money off a book than a play. In other words, might Christie not have chosen the easier and potentially more lucrative route to a career? (Furthermore, really good books, like Christie's, can last—and sell—forever, but plays, except, of course, The Mousetrap, come and go and can even disappear.) Kirk generally agreed, saying I was on "the right track."
[Kirk also added, "As a girl Christie loved theater, and wrote little plays; she was also a voracious reader. She wrote a few small things before her first book, and then it was off to the races." I imagine that Kirk's suggestions for her choice of literary form are right on, but I still imagine the practicalities entered into her reckoning—along with good fortune.]
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