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In a sense, Agatha Christie could be hailed as the progenitor of the modern psychological thriller, which is concerned with how things can go very wrong between people living in what appears on the outside to be an ordinary domestic set-up. What goes on behind closed doors, in our neighbor’s houses, in ordinary seeming households…in other people’s minds? The schadenfreude is strong with this one.
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They appeal to that nosy, curtain-curtain-twitching impetus that exists in all of us-its human nature. This, surely, is also key to the enduring success of the novels. I also think that they’re far more interesting for it. Her novels are thus profoundly discomfiting because they posit the idea that anyone might be capable of committing a murder, given the right impetus. They kill spouses, acquaintances, colleagues, friends, relatives with disturbing cool-headedness. Her characters are rarely in the grip of any identifiable “madness”: they plan their murders meticulously, rationally, often with plenty of forethought and time to change their minds. Christie, however, tends to look at why ordinary, otherwise law-abiding people kill-and that, surely, is the more terrifying premise.
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Their actions are about as predictable or explicable as an earthquake, a freak accident.
HOW MANY BOOKS DID AGATHA CHRISTIE WRITE SERIAL
When we have a killer in a novel who is a psychopath or sociopath-the “mad axe-murderer” or the “evil genius” serial killer-they exist outside society. As I see it, the very normality of the characters is in itself an argument for her novels being anything but cozy. In another of her mysteries, the murderer is revealed to be a twelve year old girl with a chillingly banal motive for killing. In And Then There Were None we have, among others, a World War One hero, a physician, a police officer, a schoolmistress, a judge. Her casts tend to be made up of characters from the middle classes or even the aristocracy, they’re often what we call “upstanding members of society” in Britain: doctors, military personnel, lawyers, bank managers and homemakers. Many of her novels are set in small, quaint British villages, or sleepy country houses, or genteel hotels. And I wonder if one of the reasons people think of Agatha Christie as a “cozy” crime writer is because she writes about ordinary people, in domestic settings. They are also explorations of what it is that drives normal folk to murder. Because when you look a little closer you’ll realize that her novels are often incisive and unsparing visions of society and of its ills. But if you’re reading them on any other level, any deeper level, that impression falls away. So yes, perhaps there’s a kind of cozy comfort to be found in this. Arguably this universally enjoyable puzzle aspect is one of the reasons the books translate so well, the key to their versatility-why they have been published in so many languages and continue to sell in astounding numbers today. I enjoy reading an Agatha Christie novel and trying to guess the solution before the end-and have been immensely pleased with myself on the one or two times I have guessed. I wanted people to be able to see it as a puzzle, one in which they had many of the clues they needed to help them come to the conclusion-that going back through the book they might see how they could have solved it if they’d spotted them all. It was very much one of the elements I wanted to replicate in writing my own contemporary murder mystery, The Hunting Party. “Oh,” they say, “they’re just like a game of Clue, aren’t they? Colonel Mustard in the Library with the candlestick…that sort of thing.” And I have no doubt they were intended by their author to be enjoyed on that level, the level of a game. People get a misty-eyed look when talking of them. As a longtime fan of Agatha Christie’s novels, I think we do their writer something of a disservice when we call them “cozy crime.” I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard them spoken of thus.