The self-conscious, formalist impulse behind Christie’s work is the explanation for one of the biggest puzzles about her books: why the most popular detective writer of all time had as her principal character a man who is, by general agreement, the worst detective of all.
By "worst" I mean least likeable, most implausible, most annoying, vainest, and the one whose characterisation is most dependent on whimsical details that add nothing in terms of psychological insight: in other words, Poirot. (By "whimsical details" I mean all that guff about hot chocolate and moustaches and "the little grey cells".)
Detectives are often – one might go so far as to say are usually – annoying and implausible, but nobody is more so than Poirot, as Christie herself acknowledged. "Would anyone go and 'consult; him?" she wondered aloud. "One feels not." He was, she said, "regarded perhaps with more affection by outsiders than by his own creator".
Her advice to writers starting out on a career in detective fiction was: "Be very careful what central character you create – you may have him with you for a very long time!"
In that same essay, Christie put her finger on something which has long been apparent to her readers, that Miss Marple, in her creator’s words "an elderly, gossipy lady in a small village, who pokes her nose into all that does or does not concern her, and draws deductions based on years of experience of human nature", is fundamentally believable in a fashion that her other great detective isn’t.
And yet there are only 12 Marple novels and 20 short stories, versus Poirot’s total of 33 novels, 51 stories and a play.
Christie is often dismissed as "cosy", but it seems to me that Miss Marple, with her belief that you can understand every variety of human evil by studying everyday life in an English village, is one of the least cosy figures in our literature.
I can't be the only person to find Sherlock Holmes more irritating than Poirot?
ReplyDeleteJohn Lanchester writes that there is no theological aspect to how Christie writes about evil. Poirot however is shaped by his Catholicism, reflected in his views on justice and retribution. Fragments of Poirot's back story emerge in the novels; he can't go back to the life he had before the Great War and the whimsical details are part of how he maintains his self identity and copes with change. Today we would recognise his orderliness and the moustaches as signs of OCD.
Would the wealthy employ a ridiculous peacock as a detective? Before discounting the idea, look at celebrity chefs....