Followers of great mystery novels would recall that strange eerie feeling one got from reading “Ten Little Niggers“, with its intricate plot of intrigue and revenge, where ten people of different backgrounds get trapped in an island and then start getting killed one after the other till none are left ! One is on tenterhooks right till the mystery is unravelled!
In a family of ardent lovers of murder mysteries, we’ve been hooked on the Agatha Christie novels and her uncanny characters – Poirot and Miss Marple were her most well-known detectives, possibly second only to the invincible Sherlock Holmes, created by Arthur Conan Doyle. Her success as an author of sleuth stories earned her titles like the “Queen of Crime” and the “Queen of Mystery.” Agatha Christie is also be considered a queen of all publishing genres as she is one of the top-selling authors in history, with her combined works selling more than 2 billion copies worldwide.
The world will celebrate her 135th birth anniversary on 15th Sept. Tandra and I were reminiscing the aura of mystery and suspense she’d created without resorting to the gore and violence of the modern day thriller genre. As her great detective Poirot ( always using his “little grey cells” ) would say, crimes were committed for the same reasons – greed, jealousy, revenge but our attention was always drawn to the obvious just like the magician would perform his trick by a sleight of hand under one’s nose. One may ask, when a woman is bumped off, why is her husband the prime suspect ?
My favourite Christie novel remains “Witness for the Prosecution” a spell binding courtroom drama which was also made into an unforgettable film starring Charles Laughton and Marlene Dietrich back in the Fifties. Fortunately the superb film is now available on Amazon Prime. Among the many others are the amazing “Murder on the Orient Express “ and “Death on the Nile” which later became popular films !
Set in an era gone by, Christie’s novels had a classical quality as she loved to borrow names not only from Shakespeare but also from nursery rhymes ! Titles of some of her novels were rhymes like “Hickory Dickory Dock “ or “Taken at the Flood“ drawn from the famous lines of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Later in the 80s, we also saw a wonderful film starring Elizabeth Taylor based on her novel “Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side“ (a line from a famous quote ! ). Agatha Christie died on January, 1976 , almost fifty years ago, but she left a huge legacy of literature for generations to come.
As the genial but astutely observant, Miss Marple would say “ Human beings remain the same everywhere , with all their follies & weaknesses …” & love for Dame Agatha !
Working on Living 