Agatha Christie was not cozy. She earned the title the Queen of Crime the old-fashioned way — by killing off a lot of people. Although never graphic or gratuitous, she was breathtakingly ruthless. Children, old folks, newlyweds, starlets, ballerinas — no one is safe in a Christie tale. In “Hallowe’en Party,” she drowns a young girl in a tub set up for bobbing apples and, many chapters later, sends Poirot in at the very last minute to prevent a grisly infanticide. In “The ABC Murders,” she sets up one of the first detective-taunting serial killers. The signature country home aside, Christie’s literary world was far from homogenous. Her plots, like her life, were international, threading through urban and pastoral, gentry and working class, dipping occasionally into the truly psychotic or even supernatural. Christie murders were committed for all the Big Reasons — love, money, ambition, fear, revenge — and they were committed by men, women, children and in one case, the narrator. Some of her books are truly great — “Death on the Nile,” “And Then There Were None,” “The Secret Adversary,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Curtain” to name a few — and some are not. But even the worst of them (“The Blue Train,” “The Big Four”) bear the hallmarks of a master craftsman. Perhaps not on her best day, but the failures make us appreciate the successes, and the woman behind them, that much more.
more from Mary McNamara at the LA Times here.