A Half-Century With Agatha Christie

            The first adult mystery novel I read was Agatha Christie’s Murder in Mesopotamia. I was 12 years old at the time, and, my moral scruples not being as fully developed as they are now, I cheated and looked at the last page to see who the killer was. I still got it wrong.

            As I recall, the book was one of several on a shelf in a cabin our family was occupying in Jackson Hole, WY. The cabin was located at a beautiful cattle ranch that was one of the inspirations for the ranch in my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance. There was no TV, the summer nights were long, and I was one of those kids who never had to be prodded to read a book.

            Murder in Mesopotamia was one of the Hercule Poirot mysteries, and I went on to read most of them by the time I finished junior high school. It was the beginning of a lifelong mystery habit.

Coming to Appreciate Miss Marple

            During that period I checked out a couple of the Miss Marple mysteries and a couple of the non-Poirot stand-alone books. I didn’t much care for them, which is on me far more than on Dame Agatha. Something about Poirot and his “little grey cells” appealed to my keen adolescent mind.

            After ripping through the Christie oeuvre in my youth, I pretty much left her alone for a couple of decades. There were plenty of other mysteries to read, and I read as many as I could. My preference is for British writers, though I am no absolutist on that score, and one preference I inherited from Christie is an appreciation for a story that wraps up all the loose ends. Few things in a mystery novel annoy me as much as a puzzle that’s dangled before the reader, then never explained at the end — especially when it’s clearly a case of carelessness rather than calculated ambiguity.

            In recent years I’ve started dipping into Agatha Christie’s books again. With the passage of a few decades, my perspective has changed. Poirot I now find a bit pedantic, while the virtues of Miss Marple have risen steadily in my estimation.

Echoes of Austen and Hardy

            What appeals now in the Marple books is the moral understanding of  human frailty. Miss Marple repeatedly points out that having spent her life in a small English village, she has witnessed every form of folly and depravity there is. The people who pine for a Mayberry society should take note. And when Christie develops a theme fully and richly, as in The Mirror Crack’d, the sense of damage done by personal obliviousness calls to mind the irony of Jane Austen, and the way in which a casual, unthinking act can unleash a chain of awful circumstances recalls Thomas Hardy.

            (We’ve even rented some of the Miss Marple films, starring Margaret Rutherford, from the early 1960s on Netflix. They’re not at all what Agatha Christie intended, but are well-done and entertaining in their own right.)

            Something I haven’t done, and don’t intend to do, is re-read Murder in Mesopotamia. I want that book to remain forever fixed in my mind the way I first read it and experienced it, as a 12-year-old in a cabin on a ranch in Wyoming, with the summer sun setting at last. There are some things you just shouldn’t mess with.         

Slightly edited version of original post from March 2013

Teachers Who Mattered

                  The late, great American fiction writer Flannery O’Connor once observed, “There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” That quote was put out recently in a writers’ affinity group to which I belong, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

                  It so happens that my next Quill Gordon mystery, still untitled, features a retired English teacher as the murder victim. In the book, I’m trying to portray her as a carrier of the highest standards — definitely someone whose students would never grow up to write Valley of the Dolls. Come to think of it, does anyone under 60 remember Valley of the Dolls? It was a sixties-era sex-booze-and-drugs shocker that was the sort of bestseller O’Connor was probably talking about.

                  But I digress. My point is that in my boyhood, teachers like the one in my book roamed the hallways of nearly every public high school, but, alas, no more.

Swift and Sure Punishment

                  My wife, Linda, teaches biology at a state university. One of her classes is a lower-division course intended to teach students the correct techniques for writing a scientific paper. She sometimes finds it frustrating when it’s clear she’s dealing with a student who seems never to have been instructed in the basic techniques of writing of any kind.

                  At the public high school she attended decades ago, the teachers were unforgiving of gross errors. She recalls that Mrs. Roark, an English teacher, and Mr. Hashimoto, a history teacher, demanded good writing. Another English teacher would give a student an F on a paper if it contained a single run-on sentence. Or a sentence fragment. Late at night, reading a muddled effort by one of her students, Linda is given to putting her head in her hands and saying, “This poor kid never had a Mrs. Roark or Mr. Hashimoto in high school.”

                  Attending public schools in Southern California in the 1960s, I was blessed to have three outstanding English teachers between ninth and twelfth grades.

Three Who Mattered

                  Mr. McDonald, who taught English and journalism in ninth grade, probably was more responsible than anyone else for setting me on my career path. He also assigned Gone With the Wind as a book in the English class, which was hugely valuable. No one who took that class would ever again be intimidated by the length of a book.

                  Miss Irwin, who taught American Literature my junior year in high school, taught us how to appreciate The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick. She also showed how to handle the racially-charged issues of the former book in an enlightened and sensitive way.

                  Mrs. Carruth was my senior year English Literature teacher, who had us read Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens, among others. The way she drew us into Austen’s moral world was a triumph of good teaching.

                  Reflecting back on those wonderful teachers, I’ve decided to dedicate my next mystery novel to them, in appreciation for what they taught me about how to write and how to read a book. The more I think about it, the more I figure it’s the least I can do, really. After all, if not for them, I might have written a bestseller.

A Latte, My Mystery, or Both?

            A few hours after posting the previous blog, in which I forecast a future for dead-tree books for some time to come, I had to attend a meeting in Santa Cruz. Before it started, I was talking with several people I know, and one of them asked how my book was doing.

            Another asked what kind of book it was, and when I replied it was a mystery novel, he said he was a big mystery fan and asked for the name of it. I told him The McHenry Inheritance, and in about 30 seconds he showed me the cover, from Amazon, on his iPhone. When I told him that was the one, he bought it on the spot and showed everyone the title page on his phone. Then another friend, also a mystery fan, joined the conversation, and the guy who had just bought the book sent him a link as we stood there.

            I wish selling books could always be that easy.

Instant Digital Gratification

            At $2.99 for the e-book, my mystery, like a latte, is essentially an impulse purchase. The internet makes it way too easy to buy something on the spur of the moment, but since that’s working in my favor at the moment, I’m not complaining.

            Shortly after Christmas I was reading The New York Times Sunday book section on my iPad when I came across a review of Death Comes to Pemberley, a mystery novel by British author P.D. James, drawing on characters from Pride and Prejudice. My wife, Linda, is a big Jane Austen fan, so I e-mailed the review to her, along with a query: Want to buy? From the next room, she e-mailed back yes, so I went to Amazon, bought the book with one click, and a few minutes later had it on my iPad ready to go. She stayed up late that night to get started reading it.

            For all the ease of doing it that way, I am not yet a total convert. Probably three out of four books that I read are actual printed books. I subscribe to the Times on my iPad and enjoy it very much, but find it maddeningly slow at times — three to four minutes to bring up a page in the worst case. I’ve been a New Yorker subscriber since 1968 and get the iPad version as well as the print. I read about a third of it on the pad and the rest in the mail-delivered print version.

Buyer’s Remorse

            The ability to buy something on the spur of the moment has its downside. A few months ago I was in a large department store trying to cash out a couple of bucks on a gift card. The only person ahead of me was a woman with two Santa Claus-sized bags in tow, from which she was taking item after item, which then had to be scanned for a return. As the line began to build behind her, she turned, flashed a wry smile, and said:

            “Sorry. I do a lot of online shopping.”

            When I recently offered my book free on Amazon, more than 300 people bought it. If 15 of them actually read it and post a review, I’ll be doing pretty well. Most of the rest probably grabbed it because it looked halfway interesting and the price was right. It was an easy score, but probably with not much reward. It calls to mind Carrie Fisher’s famous line, “The problem with instant gratification is that it isn’t fast enough.”