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Latest topic of rumination: I've finally figured out why Agatha Christie (who was probably my second favorite author in the world -- after Anne McCaffrey -- between the ages of seven and twelve) frequently gets straight up my nose now that my reading protocols have matured.
No, it's not the racism. Or the anti-Semitism. Or the just flat-out fucked construction of heterosexual relations*. (Although if you want to see me in a sputtering fury, start me on Nemesis, wherein everyone we're meant to sympathize with seems to think that Verity's only conceivable purpose in life was to be the redeemer of Jason Rafiel, who is certainly a criminal and probably an arrant sociopath -- and the only person who doesn't think it was a good match turns out to have killed her. Motivated, if you please, by Lesbian Possessiveness. And this was in 1971.)
No, what's really getting on my nerves lately -- and this is relevant to recent trains of thought, because I have a feeling that the line between country-house ghost story and country-house murder mystery are blurrier than they appear -- is that every now and again, some psychological element of one of her books is trying to transcend its genre, and she won't let it.
I'm going to pick on Appointment with Death for this post, because it's one of the two most blatant examples I can think of -- Miss Bunner's birthday party and subsequent poisoning in A Murder is Announced being the other, and actually my favorite, but there's twelve years' distance between the books, and by AMiA I think she'd learned a few things about keeping control of her narrative. So it's more tidily constructed and I think succeeds better as a mystery (and would be my favorite if not for the inexcusable xenophobic streak right down the middle of it) but AwD is messier and more interesting to pick apart.
The book's emotional center, and the principal thing it has going for it, is the large and dysfunctional Boynton family, tourists traveling in the Middle East: the monstrous and utterly believable Mrs. Boynton; her stepchildren Lennox, Raymond, and Carol and daughter-in-law Nadine; and her biological daughter, Jinny. Mrs. Boynton is a control freak and a psychological sadist of the first water; we don't, thankfully, see much of la famille Boynton on their own, but Christie is, as she's occasionally capable of being, more or less dead accurate in observing the results of a protracted campaign of psychological torture. Lennox is a thoroughly institutionalized non-entity whose wife (entirely correctly, imho) is flirting with the concept of leaving him; Raymond and Carol are both twitchy as hell, pathetically overexcited by the prospect of normal social interaction, and obsessed with their own wrongness; and Jinny is, erm, a little unwell. (Is actually displaying textbook symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, but don't get me started on Christie and mental illness**.)
The book, in fact, opens with Raymond and Carol making serious plans to murder their stepmother in cold blood, and although Christie was never notable for the subtlety of her dialogue, the anvils being dropped here are the correct anvils:
[Appointment with Death, reprinted in Make Mine Murder, pp. 12-13]
But, of course, this being the opening scene, the one thing we can be fairly certain of is that neither Ray nor Carol is going to be the murderer; the axiom of Golden Age murder mysteries, of course, is it's always the last person you'd suspect, and Christie jumps through some extraordinary plot hoops to make that the case here. The ending is only barely not a cheat on a sheer narrative level, and definitely is one emotionally, because the trouble with this book -- of course -- is that the Boyntons flat-out don't belong in a Golden Age murder mystery, and Christie doesn't have the ambition -- or, as I think the excerpt quoted above would tend to prove, the chops -- to write the book they should be in.
As a general rule, you see, Golden Age murder mysteries aren't about people; they're exquisite mathematical models with no room in them for the chaos of actual human behavior. Christie's books, particularly the Poirot series****, tend to read as though they'd been conceived hook-first and then had the characters reverse engineered into them to suit the needs of the plot, and I'm given to understand that she wasn't the worst offender in her field.
What she was, really, was... well, the author of 66 novels in 56 years (under her own name -- she also wrote romances -- and not counting short story collections), which is not a pace that allows for a vast amount of thought to be put into any individual work. I'm quite willing to believe that she took pride in her work, but the evidence tends to show that with a few exceptions she was quite satisfied to cling to her genre conventions like grim death, quite frequently at the expense of her story.
Because the book that AwD is trying to be, that its characters deserve, is a really fascinating one right up until Mrs. Boynton's actual death -- less of a whodunit than a who'll-do-it-first, as the Middle Eastern sun beats down and absolutely everybody in the Boynton party has a perfectly valid and psychologically honest reason to kill off the old gorgon, assuming Raymond's love interest doesn't do it first...
... and then she does die, and it all collapses into who's-got-the-alibi, and the killer turns out to have been an incredibly minor character who Mrs. Boynton was conveniently blackmailing; and it's well done, marriages all round, everyone recovers from their trauma in time for an epilogue that makes the one to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows look like a miracle of sensitive characterization.
Because that's how these stories work. And because Christie fundamentally isn't all that interested in expanding her own boundaries far enough to tell the story honestly.
SIGH.
* There are only two textually-endorsed romantic relationships in Christie that don't consistently make me want to strangle something; one is Tommy and Tuppence, who are blissful, and the other is Jerry and Megan from The Moving Finger, who are unbelievably problematic, but in a way that's so staggeringly and overtly about dominance and submission that I can't help but like it.
** You could make the case that she's probably not worse on the subject than most of her contemporaries, but we have Sayers's handling of post-traumatic stress to demonstrate that at least one of said contemporaries, working in the same genre, was significantly better. I think, unfortunately, that what it feels like is Christie not really wanting to think past her era's stereotypes about mental illness; even in this book, she funks her dismount somewhat significantly.
*** I also want to note that, going on that scene, I want to read a tiny bit of emotionally incestuous subtext into Ray and Carol's relationship -- it would fit -- but I have to really lean on the text to get there. As one would expect, really, this being a series mystery published in 1938; Christie did write a draft of Sleeping Murder -- which hinges on the murderer's obsessive sexual jealousy of his sister -- probably around 1940, but somehow I think that deliberately implying anything of the sort between sympathetic characters would have been a little bit beyond her personal pale at any point in her career. Although one may make what one will of the fact that the epilogue marries Carol off very abruptly to a man who'd spent the majority of the book sniffing after her sister-in-law, which does read to me as authorial awareness of a loose end needing to be tied up in a hurry.
**** It's extremely tempting to connect this to the fact that Christie was apparently willing to go on record, quite early, as loathing Poirot; given that a few of the Marple books are actually quite emotionally coherent by genre standards -- as well as A Murder is Announced I'd mention The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side -- the polite word to use about the Poirot series would seem to be "coasting."
ETA: Oh, and the other thing, which I can't believe I didn't realize until I woke up this morning: Raymond's love interest is an embryonic version of his stepmother. Which makes the ending even more hollow. Proof when I can sit down and write it out.
No, it's not the racism. Or the anti-Semitism. Or the just flat-out fucked construction of heterosexual relations*. (Although if you want to see me in a sputtering fury, start me on Nemesis, wherein everyone we're meant to sympathize with seems to think that Verity's only conceivable purpose in life was to be the redeemer of Jason Rafiel, who is certainly a criminal and probably an arrant sociopath -- and the only person who doesn't think it was a good match turns out to have killed her. Motivated, if you please, by Lesbian Possessiveness. And this was in 1971.)
No, what's really getting on my nerves lately -- and this is relevant to recent trains of thought, because I have a feeling that the line between country-house ghost story and country-house murder mystery are blurrier than they appear -- is that every now and again, some psychological element of one of her books is trying to transcend its genre, and she won't let it.
I'm going to pick on Appointment with Death for this post, because it's one of the two most blatant examples I can think of -- Miss Bunner's birthday party and subsequent poisoning in A Murder is Announced being the other, and actually my favorite, but there's twelve years' distance between the books, and by AMiA I think she'd learned a few things about keeping control of her narrative. So it's more tidily constructed and I think succeeds better as a mystery (and would be my favorite if not for the inexcusable xenophobic streak right down the middle of it) but AwD is messier and more interesting to pick apart.
The book's emotional center, and the principal thing it has going for it, is the large and dysfunctional Boynton family, tourists traveling in the Middle East: the monstrous and utterly believable Mrs. Boynton; her stepchildren Lennox, Raymond, and Carol and daughter-in-law Nadine; and her biological daughter, Jinny. Mrs. Boynton is a control freak and a psychological sadist of the first water; we don't, thankfully, see much of la famille Boynton on their own, but Christie is, as she's occasionally capable of being, more or less dead accurate in observing the results of a protracted campaign of psychological torture. Lennox is a thoroughly institutionalized non-entity whose wife (entirely correctly, imho) is flirting with the concept of leaving him; Raymond and Carol are both twitchy as hell, pathetically overexcited by the prospect of normal social interaction, and obsessed with their own wrongness; and Jinny is, erm, a little unwell. (Is actually displaying textbook symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, but don't get me started on Christie and mental illness**.)
The book, in fact, opens with Raymond and Carol making serious plans to murder their stepmother in cold blood, and although Christie was never notable for the subtlety of her dialogue, the anvils being dropped here are the correct anvils:
Their elbows on the window-sill, their heads close together, Raymond and Carol Boynton gazed out into the blue depths of the night. Nervously, Raymond repeated his former words:
"You do see, don't you, that she's got to be killed?"
Carol Boynton stirred slightly. She said, her voice deep and hoarse:
"It's horrible..."
"It's not more horrible than this!"
"I suppose not..."
Raymond said violently:
"It can't go on like this -- it can't.... We must do something... And there isn't anything else we can do..."
Carol said -- but her voice was unconvincing and she knew it --
"If we could get away somehow...?"
"We can't." His voice was empty and hopeless. "Carol, you know we can't..."
The girl shivered.
"I know, Ray -- I know."
He gave a sudden short bitter laugh.
"People would say we were crazy -- not to be able to just walk out --"
[...]
Then she broke out suddenly:
"She's mad... I'm quite sure she's mad... She -- she couldn't torture us like she does if she were sane. For years we've been saying: 'This can't go on!' and it has gone on! We've said, She'll die sometime' -- but she hasn't died! I don't think she ever will die unless --"
Raymond said steadily:
"Unless we kill her..."
[...]
"Ray," she said. "You don't think it's really wrong, do you?"
He answered in that same would-be dispassionate tone:
"No. I think it's just like killing a mad dog -- something that's doing harm in the world and must be stopped. This is the only way of stopping it."
Carol murmured:
"But they'd -- they'd send us to the chair just the same... I mean we couldn't explain what she's like... It would sound fantastic... In a way, you know, it's all in our own minds!"
[...]
"It's so lovely -- the night and the blueness and the stars. If only we could be part of it all... If only we could be like other people instead of being as we are -- all queer and warped and wrong."
"But we shall be -- all right -- when she's dead!"
"Are you sure? Isn't it too late? Sha'n't we always be queer and different?"***
[Appointment with Death, reprinted in Make Mine Murder, pp. 12-13]
But, of course, this being the opening scene, the one thing we can be fairly certain of is that neither Ray nor Carol is going to be the murderer; the axiom of Golden Age murder mysteries, of course, is it's always the last person you'd suspect, and Christie jumps through some extraordinary plot hoops to make that the case here. The ending is only barely not a cheat on a sheer narrative level, and definitely is one emotionally, because the trouble with this book -- of course -- is that the Boyntons flat-out don't belong in a Golden Age murder mystery, and Christie doesn't have the ambition -- or, as I think the excerpt quoted above would tend to prove, the chops -- to write the book they should be in.
As a general rule, you see, Golden Age murder mysteries aren't about people; they're exquisite mathematical models with no room in them for the chaos of actual human behavior. Christie's books, particularly the Poirot series****, tend to read as though they'd been conceived hook-first and then had the characters reverse engineered into them to suit the needs of the plot, and I'm given to understand that she wasn't the worst offender in her field.
What she was, really, was... well, the author of 66 novels in 56 years (under her own name -- she also wrote romances -- and not counting short story collections), which is not a pace that allows for a vast amount of thought to be put into any individual work. I'm quite willing to believe that she took pride in her work, but the evidence tends to show that with a few exceptions she was quite satisfied to cling to her genre conventions like grim death, quite frequently at the expense of her story.
Because the book that AwD is trying to be, that its characters deserve, is a really fascinating one right up until Mrs. Boynton's actual death -- less of a whodunit than a who'll-do-it-first, as the Middle Eastern sun beats down and absolutely everybody in the Boynton party has a perfectly valid and psychologically honest reason to kill off the old gorgon, assuming Raymond's love interest doesn't do it first...
... and then she does die, and it all collapses into who's-got-the-alibi, and the killer turns out to have been an incredibly minor character who Mrs. Boynton was conveniently blackmailing; and it's well done, marriages all round, everyone recovers from their trauma in time for an epilogue that makes the one to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows look like a miracle of sensitive characterization.
Because that's how these stories work. And because Christie fundamentally isn't all that interested in expanding her own boundaries far enough to tell the story honestly.
SIGH.
* There are only two textually-endorsed romantic relationships in Christie that don't consistently make me want to strangle something; one is Tommy and Tuppence, who are blissful, and the other is Jerry and Megan from The Moving Finger, who are unbelievably problematic, but in a way that's so staggeringly and overtly about dominance and submission that I can't help but like it.
** You could make the case that she's probably not worse on the subject than most of her contemporaries, but we have Sayers's handling of post-traumatic stress to demonstrate that at least one of said contemporaries, working in the same genre, was significantly better. I think, unfortunately, that what it feels like is Christie not really wanting to think past her era's stereotypes about mental illness; even in this book, she funks her dismount somewhat significantly.
*** I also want to note that, going on that scene, I want to read a tiny bit of emotionally incestuous subtext into Ray and Carol's relationship -- it would fit -- but I have to really lean on the text to get there. As one would expect, really, this being a series mystery published in 1938; Christie did write a draft of Sleeping Murder -- which hinges on the murderer's obsessive sexual jealousy of his sister -- probably around 1940, but somehow I think that deliberately implying anything of the sort between sympathetic characters would have been a little bit beyond her personal pale at any point in her career. Although one may make what one will of the fact that the epilogue marries Carol off very abruptly to a man who'd spent the majority of the book sniffing after her sister-in-law, which does read to me as authorial awareness of a loose end needing to be tied up in a hurry.
**** It's extremely tempting to connect this to the fact that Christie was apparently willing to go on record, quite early, as loathing Poirot; given that a few of the Marple books are actually quite emotionally coherent by genre standards -- as well as A Murder is Announced I'd mention The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side -- the polite word to use about the Poirot series would seem to be "coasting."
ETA: Oh, and the other thing, which I can't believe I didn't realize until I woke up this morning: Raymond's love interest is an embryonic version of his stepmother. Which makes the ending even more hollow. Proof when I can sit down and write it out.
