Those Golden Age Ladies Weren't so Hot!

 RHYS BOWEN:

I read an article recently by Sophie Hannah (who is continuing to write Agatha Christie books) in which she called Agatha Christie a genius.  She said:

Anyone who suggests that Agatha Christie’s actual writing or prose style or novelistic ability is anything other than top-notch is a crazy fool! Not only is she a brilliant plotter and entertainer; she is also a writer of unparalleled excellence! No, not just a great storyteller—actually a great writer in a literary sense! Like Virginia Woolf! Like Charles Dickens! Like Shakespeare!’

I think some of you may be laughing by now or shaking your heads. And I think I have to agree with you. She was no Pat Conroy or even Dennis Lehane, or even Reginald Hill whose novels still haunt me. She told a good tale. She kept me guessing until the end. But that was about it. Great books to read on a plane or a beach.

So where does she really stack up against great writers?

1.         Her characters are usually one dimensional. Poirot is vain, boastful. We never know what makes him tick, whether he has ever been in love, wept, mourned. Miss Marple is more complicated and I think Christie’s most interesting character. But the others can be summed up in two words: nosy spinster, bad son, domineering father. We know that the son is bad because he forged checks and therefore is a suspect in a murder, but we never know what he turned out that way. Was he sent off to boarding school at seven, rejected by his mother, kept short of cash by a controlling father? There are some exceptions. I recently re-read The Hollow which is a completely character-driven plot.

2.         The stories are always whodunnit and never whydunit. The crime writing field has moved into richer, more multilayered stories in which we are involved in the private lives and histories of the sleuth and the characters and their relationships.

3.         She doesn’t always play fair. Roger Ackroyd is considered a clever, innovative novel but there is an inherent unfairness to it. The narrator only tells you what he wants to and can withhold what he wants to.  In some books her sleuth knows something we don’t. Poirot says “I happen to have found out she was once a wardress in a prison.” 

Not fair!

4.         We have little sense of place in her books. The village. The market town. The big country house. But that is about it. We rarely know what plants are blooming, what birds are in the garden, what the air smells like, whether the scenery is wild and remote or soft and gentle.  People don’t stop to notice their surroundings unless there is a clue to be had. The old boathouse had its door open. The rooks were cawing suddenly.

5.         The books do not touch our emotions. Nobody weeps for the body in the library. Nobody is sad when the tormented murderer is apprehended. We remain detached observers to a crime and its solution.

I think the same is true to a certain extent with the other ladies of the Golden Age. Ngaio Marsh, Marjorie Allingham… Peter Wimsey is rather one dimensional but Harriet Vane is more interesting. Josephine Tey becomes more in a couple of novels.  It seems that these ladies  allow chinks of their own character and humanity when they create female characters but don’t have much clue about the complexities of a male sleuth. Do you agree?

And yet there must be something. Agatha has sold more books than any other writer ever. I own every book she wrote. If I am stressed or overworked I take one of her books off the shelf to read. Comfort reading --because I know what I’m going to get. It is not going to touch my emotions, leave me tense and upset.

I suppose one of the reasons for her initial success is that there were not many other crime novels published when she started.  Mystery was not established as a genre. Publishers probably only put out a dozen books a year. Then we had a very different crime writing wave in the US—the hardboiled guys, Chandler, Spillane and again spare telling of tales with little depth of characterization.

People who don’t read in our genre think of mystery novels as trite and slight because they only know of these initial writers. I have been asked if I ever intend to write a real book. But oh, how we have evolved. The best crime writing today can be called great literature. Complex characters, multiple timelines, incredible sense of place, nuanced feelings of right and wrong. What’s more, we have plots and climaxes and we don’t end our books walking down a beach in Maine wondering about the meaning of life.

So I’d be interested to know what you feel. We all love Agatha Christie but does she count among the great writers? For that matter what makes a great writer?  What makes an enduring book?