Read All Your Books Before Purchasing New Ones – Part 1: Agatha Christie

I do not know why books get bought enthusiastically only to be read decades later. Which is why I recently made a vow not to buy any new books before I have not read all the ones which are left untouched on my bookshelf. When I look at all those neatly stacked volumes, I notice that some have accompanied me for over twenty years. Some look like they are about to fall apart (My Richard Scarry’s Please and Thank you Book for instance)-others are in suspiciously good shape. Bookshelves display book-phases: There is the Kafka-phase, the Wilde-phase, the Flaubert-, Proust-, the I want to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy before I watch the motion picture-phase (well, it’s too late for that now), or any other I want to read X before Y-phase, and so forth. What I usually do, when I am in one of my phases, is to purchase different novels from the same author. Once I read the first one, some other reading material that catches my eye, distracts me. There has been one book in particular, that has stirred my guilty feelings. It is an Agatha Christie trilogy that my sister had given to me for my seventeenth birthday. On the first page, she wrote a poem which she had composed, and drew a snail with an antenna on its shell – a trademark of hers. Needless to say how much I missed out on, by postponing the reading for so many years.

The respective volume contains the stories, Five Little Pigs, A Murder is Announced, and Taken at the Flood. When reading these stories, I asked myself whether the “modern” reader has a lead over the “old” reader of Christie; because of the possible exposure to all those crime shows on TV (provided, they expose themselves to it). This might harden the modern reader and thus, make him or her foresee the plot. If so, does that mean that “modern” Christie readers cannot appreciate these stories the same way as the “old” reader might have appreciated them? Did readers back in the 40s and 50s have a different reading experience? Were they more scared to go to bed after poring over this sort of crime fiction? Were they more excited when Hercules Poirot or Miss Marple announced who the murderer was?

As far as the first premise is concerned, I do not think that increased exposure to crime fiction, or crime TV shows, etc., transform the reader into a super-sleuth who already gets it all. What I do think is that people who lived during the time when Christie novels were published, had a better understanding of the time in which the story unfolds; a better grasp of references made about people, places, politics, etc. It would be interesting to know, what people back then were taking in when reading Christie texts. I am a reader of Agatha Christie who has no idea what it was like to live during that time in which the story unfolds, but the author leaves me hints that I then can compare to now (e.g., references about clothing/textile, social relationships, money). What seems plausible is that these references which I, as the modern day reader, need, in order to make sense about the period, might have been read and meditated on differently in the past.

In conclusion, it seems that Agatha Christie’s strongest asset was to create stories that are timeless and appeal to a vast variety of readers. What I most like about Christie, is that she gave us Miss Marple and Hercules Poirot-two entirely different protagonists that are a consistent staff in her stories. When beginning to read her novels, one never knows who is going to appear -Poirot or Miss Marple (for they never solve crimes together), and that alone can be just as exciting as getting through the last pages.