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 current 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 several 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
pedantic and tiresome, 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 emphasis on human frailty and folly.
Miss Marple repeatedly points out that having spent her life in a small English
village, she has witnessed every form of human 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 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 very 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.
