Some Thoughts on My Year With Agatha C
Last weekend I completed my 2020 reading challenge. Sleeping Murder - Miss Marple’s Last Case, was the final crime fiction novel of the 66 Agatha Christie wrote in a publishing career which spanned six decades. I managed to complete all 66 in around about 11 months. I have to admit I feel a little bereft now. Weekend’s won’t be the same without the promise of a Poirot to lose myself in. I already have a couple of reading challenges for 2021 in mind and will be sharing them here soon, but Agatha Christie’s centenary was something special, not least because of the year it fell upon. Back in the heady days of early 2020, when I broke the spine on The Mysterious Affair at Styles I had absolutely no idea what was ahead of me or how reading Christie would help me navigate the turbulent times ahead.
I’ve written at length about my experience of reading Agatha Christie during a pandemic. If you’re interested there’s a great article here which Martin Doyle kindly published in the Irish Times. I also drew up my own version of Agatha Christie bingo for anyone who’d like to play along. Check out some key AC tropes to look out for in her novels here. Or if you’re looking for some books to get lost in as Lockdown drags on into a second year, I’d recommend reading Agatha Christie. I’ve listed all her novels here in chronological order. If you do take up the challenge, let me know how you get on.
For now, I thought I’d conclude a great year of reading with a few unexpected side-benefits of reading all 66 Agatha Christies during the strangest year of my life so far.
Nostalgia - I’m not sure if you’ve noticed how many people have turned to childhood favourites for comfort during Lockdown. We’ve had 90s pop groups reforming, people revisiting classic 80s movies and Jason Donovan advertising Dairy Milk. Because I first encountered Christie (both on page and screen), as a young child, I found the experience of reading her during a deeply unsettling period of my life incredibly cathartic and soothing. (Which is a little odd when you consider what her books are about).
Adaptations - I’ve been trying to watch as many Christie adaptations as I can source and have done my best to watch the corresponding film as soon as I’ve finished the book. I can’t think of any other novelist whose work has been so widely and comprehensively adapted and it’s been an intriguing experience to see how much is lost, tweaked, corrupted and (very occasionally improved upon) in the transition from page to screen.
Art Work - I grew up reading the rather beige and boring 1980s Fontana editions but in the course of tracking down all 66 novels I’ve managed to find quite a few of the 1970s Fontana editions which appear to have been designed by someone who consumed vast amounts of acid and went wandering round a haunted house ie. amazing. (Am now going to try to track them all down).
Progression - I’ve never read the (almost) complete body of a writer's work chronologically before. I usually jump in with a contemporary novel when the writer comes to my attention, then read backwards and forwards. I can thoroughly recommend chronological reading. It was so interesting to watch Christie’s style and themes develop and also to mark the evolution of her attitude and the preoccupations of the time. I wouldn’t say Agatha Christie ever entirely became PC but some of her more problematic outlooks certainly improved as her career progressed. With a few choice exceptions in the later years, her novels definitely do peak mid-career though.
Community - Who’d have thought there were so many fellow Agatha Christie mega-fans out there. I’ve actually made friends through this reading project and in 2020 I’m very grateful for all the community I can get. It was also lovely to see fellow readers responding with their own Agatha Christie experiences and memories every time I published an article or talked about her work in an interview. Agatha Christie brings people together. Almost everyone I’ve talked to about this project has read at least one of her books.
Biographies - I took the reading project as a good excuse to read a number of excellent non-fiction books about Agatha Christie’s life and work, including her own tremendously comprehensive autobiography and I have to say that in a year when my confidence as a writer took a fair battering I found AC a fantastically encouraging and down to earth role model. I love her no-nonsense approach to her writing. I love her ability to hoard and juggle multiple ideas simultaneously. I love that she occasionally took the piss out of herself (most notably with the creation of the fiction crime writer Ariadne Oliver) and I love that, like me, she often got fed up with the endless rounds of book promotion which kept her away from her writing desk. Despite her monolithic success, there’s something very recognisable and real about AC.
Writing - I’ve been mostly reading Christie for pleasure this but I’ve also been keeping half an eye on how she uses structure, plot and particularly tension in her novels. I’ll confess, as a magic realist, I didn’t think I’d have much to learn from Christie’s plotting but the way she writes tension is absolutely astounding. I now have a notebook full of scribbled comments and ideas I hope to work into my own stories at some stage. There’s no one I know who leaves a breadcrumb trail of plot clues quite like she does.
Escape - I’ll end with this because it’s my main take away from this reading year. I wish Agatha Christie was still alive as I’d love to able to write and thank her for the way her novels allowed me to forget myself on 66 separate occasions over the last twelve months. In 2020 I seemed to favour books with strong plots and well-drawn characters, the kind of stories which drew me in and transported me to a place and time which was not my living room in the here and now. Agatha Christie managed to do this 66 times. She allowed me to escape 2020 every time I opened one of her books. In a small way, I do believe she’s helped me survive this horrible year. I will always be incredibly grateful for this.