The summer I was seventeen, I gave my life to Agatha Christie. Curling on the floor of my room, I read a book a day. I liked Hercule Poirot best, then Miss Marple, then Harley Quin. I did not care for Tommy and Tuppence.
At the beginning of the summer, I felt as though I would never run out of her books, would never tire of the moment Poirot raised his eyebrow and skewered the murderer with his impeccable logic, would never get weary of stalking clues and killers. It would be impossible to tire of such overwhelming fun.
And then, in mid-August, I was suddenly done. Christie had grabbed my brain for a season, but I realized each story was a music box whose tune never varied. My senior year beckoned, and I sensed (quite rightly) that I would not have another summer to give over to an author like this.
My childhood had passed in a dream fugue of books. I had escaped my life in pages, substituting flat text for reality. But now, with Christie, I realized that as amazing as it was, it was not living.
In other words, Hercule Poirot was not real.
This was not a welcome discovery. It felt, instead, like violence. Someone had pushed me out of a nest from a great height. Adulthood loomed below me, and I did not think I knew how to fly.
I Chose Tidy Christendom
At the time I read Christie, I had been a Christian for a few years, but I did not know that she was a believer too. When I figured that out, it felt like we were members of the same nerdy club. I grew puzzled, though, when I realized that Christie was by no means alone, that her peers, notably GK Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers, had made murder-solving a modern fruit of the Spirit.
That’s weird, right?
I’d read mostly the hardboiled novels of Sara Paretsky before my Christie summer. Those books seemed as distant from both faith and the English countryside as murder did. In noir fiction, God was absent; Paretsky’s heroine, V.I. Warshawski, was cynical and world-weary, as suspicious of her own judgement as of the criminals she stalked.
In contrast, Christie’s heroes, along with Peter Wimsey and Father Brown, were startlingly clear-eyed, confident, unafraid.
Deep down, I felt more kinship with bedraggled hardboiled detectives then Miss Marple. But I never loved the noir world; I really only read Paretsky because my father brought them home. Given a choice, I chose the tidy Christendom of Father Brown and Poirot, where all loose ends would be tied up in a bow and someone would fall in love right as the killer was brought to justice…
I was over at The Mudroom last week, musing on my love affair with stories about death. Join me there?
We Don’t Need Fires Lit Beneath Us: For SheLoves