In my last post I described moving our boat to her new home on the River Dart. Agatha Christie’s home Greenway is on the River Dart. It’s a National Trust property, well worth a visit. It has been a setting in some of the TV adaptations of her novels. Christie was voted the best crime writer by the Crime Writers’ Association. According to the Guinness Book of Records, she is the best selling fiction writer, having sold of two billion books. I’ve enjoyed many of her books, and so has Claire. She seems to have written 66 detective novels between 1916 and 1956.
She had six rejections before writing The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring Hercule Poirot. I prefer Miss Marple to Poirot, and so does Claire. We also both prefer Dorothy L Sayers to Agatha Christie, but you can’t argue with the numbers, can you? Raymond Chandler criticised the artificiality of her books, and the literary critic Edmund Wilson described her prose as banal and her characterisations as superficial.
When I was thinking about starting to write fiction, I intended to write crime mysteries. I read a book called Writing Mysteries. It’s a compendium of many writers’ advice and insights, edited by Sue Grafton, Jan Burke and Barry Zeman. The first thing that struck me when I read it, was that although many authors referred to Christie, the common denominator in terms of the mystery writer who had most influenced them was Josephine Tey. I hadn’t heard of her. Both Claire and I have now read, and enjoyed many of Tey’s books. She was, I think, the first writer to have her detective hero solve a historic murder whilst lying, bored, in their hospital bed. Whilst Christie is known for her plots, Tey is brilliant at making even minor characters memorable and real, even horses and dogs. In my opinion, Josephine Tey is the better crime writer. But why do we read these books? They’re not self help books on how to be a detective, or a criminal. They’re escapism. For escapism Christie is hard to beat. Tey didn’t, to my knowledge, set her novels on the Orient Express, a Nile cruise boat, or an archaeological dig. Perhaps that’s how you sell two billion books.
In researching this piece I discovered that Christies grandmother was Mary Ann Boehmer, nee West. Maybe I’m related to Agatha Christie. I shall have to hav another go at Ancestry one day.