Romance in Christie

cujas

I had seen David Suchet's The Hollow before on television. But recently I got a chance to listen to it, as performed by Hugh Fraser.  It struck me as a love triangle as well as a mystery. I was just wondering  if there are many other stories that people  view with such a strong romantic inclination as this one.

Mrs. Christie is a very talented romantic writer, in my opinion.

I feel that her literary skills  have been much maligned and denigrated because of her outrageous mainstream success.  She deserves a new evaluation free of all the prejudice directed at mystery writers.

Griselda

Yes, very true indeed, Cujas. She has extraordinary penetration as a romantic writer, and also great wit, gently parodying the happy couples. I particularly like the romance between, SPOILER ALERT, Flora and Major Blunt in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I like the fact that Flora is getting closer to him,a and we see signs of this in the early chapters. I love the bit where he sticks up for her to the police, and Poirot gives him wise advice. I would like to have a sequel showing what happened to them. I expect they went to live in Kenya. I admire and like the Major Blunt character, and would love to see it acted really well. The romance in The Moving Finger is pretty, and humorous. A lovely romantic novel this one. I confess I have not read any of AC's romances which were written under an assumed name - Mary Westmacott. Members of this forum like them, and I bet they are brilliant. My second favourite romance in an AC mystery is the one between Egg Lytton Gore and Oliver Manders in Three Act Tragedy. This is an underrated novel, in my opinion, owing to the misfortune of it having needed a bit of editing by AC to bring out the brilliance. I so love Egg and Oliver (and Poirot's compassion for them) that as I write my attempt at an Agatha Christie novel, I am putting in Egg and Oliver as a married couple of around fifty with two children called Flora and Frederick who also enjoy sleuthing. Poirot is in my novel, and he has been invited to stay in the Manders' villa in the South of France on many occasions. Isn't it moving to see in AC novels how Poirot likes to aid romances along.    

taliavishay-arbel

I think "Ordeal by innocence has a couple of happy-ending romances, but as a whole it is very dark. I think my favourite romances in mysteries are the ones mentioned - The Hollow and the moving finger, and maybe crooked house. The thing that makes me like The Hollow best is the complexity of the love relationships - A loves B who loves C who loves D who is married to E but loves F. It starts looking like a real mess, and then when A and B get together it is simply lovely. One of my favourite love scenes. 

Griselda

We have beautiful innocent romances, and we have ugly ones which grip and strangle their host. I think the ill-starred love Jacqueline de Belvoir has for Simon Doyle is romantic love taken to an unhealthy extreme. The passions in Five Little Pigs are detailed in all their intensity and shallowness, depending on who it is doing the feeling, and we are reminded that Agatha Christie truly understood human nature. Such extraordinary perspicacity. In Five Little Pigs she references the powerful confidence of youth and its vulnerability based upon its presumption. She understood what Shakespeare was trying to say in Romeo and Juliet, and she represents through her novels almost as many shades and shadows of human feeling as he does. Like him, she has the gift for seeing truth. I read an online article in one of the British national newspapers yesterday about Christie; it was defending her from the criticism of some 'great' British writers, and thinkers ( like Bernard Levin), who said her work wasn't worth reading. A couple of 'great' female detective writers had criticized her writing style. Well, I'll tell you what, I've read a few books by them, and I find their characterization unrealistic, and their style verbose. Like a lot of twentieth century upper middle class novelists, they try to do shop workers and secretaries and write from the angle of what their prejudiced and limited powers perceive with no sense of what it is to be that person. Agatha Christie remains judgemental, whilst imaginatively assuming the feelings of the person she is writing about. It is good to have the gift of being right, if you are writer, and she usually is.

Griselda

The Mystery of the Blue Train has a strong thread of romance running through it. Love features in the mystery plot, but also acts like a sort of sub-plot. This whole novel has plenty of extraneous detail and scene setting compared with more spare story-telling ventures, such as The Sittaford Mystery. Reading 'The Blue Train' you really get a feel for those times and the social conventions, and the style of the era.

taliavishay-arbel

Griselda, you've made me curious - which"great" female mystery writer were you talking about, who criticized AC?

Griselda

I'll have to find the article. I'll look.

Griselda

I can't find the article, which would have been in the UK Guardian, Times or Telegraph, I think, but I saw another reference to an article which quoted PD James as saying AC characters were cardboard cut outs.  In browsing, I am sure I also saw that the director, or producer or something of And Then There Were None, had not read an Agatha Christie novel before asked to work on the project. Amazing, how that could have escaped her. Bernard Levin had said something to the effect that no adult of intellect should be caught reading one of her books. One famous female crime writer described her writing as 'bad', but I can't remember who it was.