Agatha Christie
Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie (15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was a British writer who wrote mysteries, psychological fiction, plays, and poetry. That is an almost laughably cryptic basic description of one of the bestselling writers in publishing. Currently, it is estimated that her books have sold approximately two billion copies. Her estate estimates that she is the most widely published author or text after the Bible and Shakespeare. She has been translated into 103 languages. Not shabby for a upper middle-class girl who liked lab work in chemistry and pharmaceuticals — and who liked to write.
She bestrides the world of mysteries like a colossus. She is often considered formulaic in her approach, “cookie-cutter,” but any respectful reading quickly dispels that envious evaluation. She wrote sixty-seven detective novels and fourteen short-story collections, intimidating enough, and influential beyond all measure for a century now. She also wrote a series of novels under the name of Mary Westmacott which astonish anyone who reads them not as gothic romance, as they were marketed, but as psychological surgeries, merciless analytical examinations of women at the sharp end of reality. She often wrote with humor, with a sharp and sassy satirical eye, and she was capable of a sensitive pathos with the people who were collateral damage in her so-called “whodunits.” Remarkably, she had a cool and ambivalent attitude toward her heroes and heroines, including Miss Marple and the great Hercule Poirot.
Agatha Christie is a complex and complicated writer. I invite you to read her as comfort fare, which she is, and I invite you to read her as a twentieth-century novelist, which she is in a circumspect and mysterious way. Enjoy!
The Man in the Brown Suit
The Man in the Brown Suit
A colorful murder mystery in which a spirited young woman plays amateur sleuth aboard a luxury cruise ship to South Africa
After young Anne Beddingfeld witnesses an accidental death in a London tube station–and the bizarre behavior of a man in a brown suit who flees the scene–she becomes convinced that foul play is at work. A woman is found murdered the next day and the police show no interest in Anne’s theory that the two incidents are connected. Spurred by a cryptic note dropped by the man in brown, Anne impulsively uses all her savings to book passage on a cruise ship heading to South Africa. On the voyage she finds herself at the center of a high-stakes game involving stolen diamonds, high society idlers, a mysteriously attractive young man, and a master criminal and his double-crossing minions.