My grandmother was a voracious reader, owning literal closets full of paperback murder mysteries and thrillers (the apple, it seems, falls quite close to the tree). Her favorite writer, by far, was Agatha Christie. She had dozens of her novels. All of them? Quite possibly. I read a handful of them when I was a teenager. They were entertaining enough, but they were always, well, grandmother books, and my attentions often turned to the titles more geared towards teenage boys.
Several decades after having read my last Christie novel, I decided last month to start reading her books again. I’ve been through the first few Miss Marples, the first few Poirots, and the entire Tommy and Tuppence series – eleven books in all. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library’s digital catalog has been a Godsend during this quarantine.
Reading them with older eyes has been enlightening. Yes, they are of course some of the most expertly plotted and crafted crime novels of all time, but there is also a real wit to them. I truly didn’t expect them to be as funny as they are. And as she wrote over the span of five-plus decades, you can slowly see England change and develop over the half of the twentieth century they covered. A big deal is never made, of course, because to Christie they were always contemporary, but it’s there.
Christie wrote just shy of eighty books. It’s early June and I’ve read eleven of them. I think I’m going to try to get through all of them by the end of the year. At my reading speed, it’s definitely doable.
I bet my grandmother could have done it.