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 Murder at the Vicarage [Vintage Books edition]
The Murder at the Vicarage [Vintage Books edition]
The famous novel in which the Queen of Crime introduced one of her most beloved characters, the indomitable Miss Marple.
St. Mary Mead appears to be a typically quaint English country village, but many dark secrets lurk under its placid surface–and its most unobtrusive resident, the elderly Miss Jane Marple, is equally easy to underestimate.
When Colonel Protheroe, the exceedingly disagreeable local magistrate, is found shot to death in the vicar’s study, the police are confounded. Nearly everyone in the village had good reason to wish the man dead, witness accounts conflict, and two contradictory confessions further muddy the waters. Suspects abound, including an archaeologist on a local dig, a young visiting artist, an unhappy wife, a local poacher, and a mysterious woman just arrived in town–and, of course, the vicar himself. But the vicar’s observant neighbor, Miss Marple, notices far more than most. An adept and shrewd student of human nature, she is the only one clever enough to untangle the clues and solve the mystery.