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. People get a misty-eyed look when talking of them. “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. It was very much one of the elements I wanted to replicate in writing my own contemporary murder mystery, The Hunting Party. 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. 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. 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.
So yes, perhaps there’s a kind of cozy comfort to be found in this. But if you’re reading them on any other level, any deeper level, that impression falls away. 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. They are also explorations of what it is that drives normal folk to murder. 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. Many of her novels are set in small, quaint British villages, or sleepy country houses, or genteel hotels. 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. In And Then There Were None we have, among others, a World War One hero, a physician, a police officer, a schoolmistress, a judge. In another of her mysteries, the murderer is revealed to be a twelve year old girl with a chillingly banal motive for killing. And this banality is key. As I see it, the very normality of the characters is in itself an argument for her novels being anything but cozy. 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. Their actions are about as predictable or explicable as an earthquake, a freak accident. Christie, however, tends to look at why ordinary, otherwise law-abiding people kill—and that, surely, is the more terrifying premise. 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. They kill spouses, acquaintances, colleagues, friends, relatives with disturbing cool-headedness. Her novels are thus profoundly discomfiting because they posit the idea that anyone might be capable of committing a murder, given the right impetus.
I also think that they’re far more interesting for it. This, surely, is also key to the enduring success of the novels. They appeal to that nosy, curtain-curtain-twitching impetus that exists in all of us—its human nature. 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. 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. There is a tendency for suspense fiction of this genre to emphasize the seeming normality of its protagonists: think of the blandly suburban, small-town set up of the Dunnes in Gone Girl, or the characters glimpsed from the train window in The Girl on the Train that the narrator yearns towards because their life seems to represent a kind of domestic bliss from which she is now banished.
Her novels are thus profoundly discomfiting because they posit the idea that anyone might be capable of committing a murder, given the right impetus.As a writer I’m much more interested in the question of why ordinary people might be driven to kill. In my murder mystery novel, The Hunting Party, my guests are on the whole well-heeled and well-behaved—they’re tax-paying, law-abiding members of society. They’re old friends bound by history. The impetus for their trip could not be more innocent, more banal: they’ve come on a vacation together, to celebrate New Year’s. They are as close to one another and as seemingly well-known to each other as you can get without being family. But, ultimately, one is driven to take another’s life. To commit the ultimate crime.
I did decide, in The Hunting Party, to remove the sleuth character that is such a beloved trope of Christie’s writing. I wanted that atmosphere of isolation to be absolute, and I felt that the character’s situation would feel all the more perilous without a sense of anyone being “in charge,” without the security—both literal and moral—that that would bring. And I suppose it is possible that one of the things that makes Christie’s books feel deceptively cosy is the presence of a “sleuth” figure—a Poirot or a Mrs Marple. In the presence of one of these masterminds, the reader knows, in a sense, that they’re in safe hands—that the crime will ultimately be solved, that the narrative will follow a certain pattern. The sleuth is never really shown as at much of a loss—and we know we’re going to get that final “drawing room” scene, in which the murderer is unveiled in a rather stately, even civilized manner, the killer obediently awaiting the sleuth’s judgement. Perhaps that‘s why there has been such a huge outcry from some viewers against the latest adaptation of The ABC Murders in which Poirot, played by John Malkovich, appears as an uncertain, diminished figure—a man whose credentials are questioned, who has been reduced to hosting “murder mystery parties” and dying his famous moustache. Undermining his credibility as a character instantly makes the whole set-up feel less certain, more fraught. I’d also argue that the sleuthless Christie novels are perhaps among her most interesting and unsettling—see Christie’s grasping sociopathic unreliable narrator in Endless Night—who is, in a sense, Christie’s Tom Ripley. Or And Then There Were None, which has the relentless, ruthless inevitability of Greek tragedy. And yet is it not possible that the use of the beloved sleuth character and formal “parlor-game” set-up allowed Christie, in a more prudish and censorious era, to get away with writing about child murderers, abusers, serial killers—often with more than a hint of sex and drugs hovering in the background? To literally get away with murder?
The female murderer is a less radical idea now than it was in Christie’s day—though arguably women who kill still have a far greater power to shock and intrigue us than do their male counterparts. But Christie’s books stand apart, in their use of the female killer, from many of her contemporaries, who tended to write murderers with a specifically masculine agency and virility. And Christie’s killers are otherwise normal women—they aren’t so-called freaks or outsiders—they are mothers, daughters, wives. Some of them are quite likable; even Poirot gets taken in on a couple of occasions. They’re calculating and clever. These aren’t women who only commit crimes of passion. They are envious, greedy, avaricious—they are, in fact, permitted all of the seven deadly sins for motive. And thus their ability to disrupt, to challenge social ideals, is all the more profound. So without particularly drawing attention to it, because she doesn’t sensationalize her female murderers, Christie was doing something fairly radical here.
Perhaps it is the curse of enduring success, that writing that was once seen as radical or trailblazing is by modern audiences read as quaint, nostalgic—just as Ian Fleming’s novels in 2019 no longer feel sexy or high-octane but a little bit silly… even a little bit toxic. And I come back to my original point that Christie’s books endure because they survive without context, on the basis of plot alone, as beautiful puzzles. Of course they can and should be read with a hot chocolate in front of a roaring fire, as a cozy evening’s entertainment. But I would argue that for the true crime fiction fan they might also be read on another, deeper, level. That it only makes for the more thrilling read.
