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(More customer reviews)Might have been a groundbreaker in its day, but it's totally disposable now. In fact, we've seen this formula done over and over again. Who needs another book with a chapter on Miss Marple, another chapter on Poirot, then one on Tommy and Tuppence, et cetera, always concentrating on how loveable these characters are? Yuck. There's even a chapter called "Christie's Prestigious Policemen," which delves into a topic no one wants to know about at all, and talk about graceless, how about the use of the word "prestigious"? Couldn't they have thought of another adjective? Maybe it wasn't high in their minds, in 1982, when this book was printed. If you get a copy with a dust jacket, you'll see a truly frightful looking book, with a line drawing of a hand--presumably Dame Agatha's--holding an old fashioned fountain pen hovering over an invisible piece of paper. Ghastly, looks like my baby sister did it.
The trouble with Christie scholarship is that it's largely all about trivia. One chapter stands above the morass of "Mrs. Oliver created a Finn Detective, a parallel to Hercule Poirot but Finnish." This is the survey chapter called "The Puzzle-Game" which rather smartly observes, categorizes and condenses some of Christie's narrative inventions--her tricks, if you will. Patricia Maida and Nicholas Spornick list the murderer's gambits as follows: the "Hidden Impersonation"--essentially you think there are 2 characters but actually there are only one. The "frame Up," in which an innocent character gets blamed for the villain's misdeeds. The "Red Herring" (a la THE CLOCKS) which isn't so fabulous if you ask me. Most of all we associate Christie with "The Cover Up Victim" in which I, a killer, fake an attack on my own life to make police and Poirot think I'm innocent. Christie fans are therefore always suspicious of anyone who survives an attack--which itself has thrown me into the soup more than once, for there are actually innocent people who haven't faked their own murders. Did you ever see SCREAM? Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven had a field day spoofing Christie's use of the "Cover Up Victim" device. Maida and Spornick also examine Christie's incredibly sophisticated use of point of view to confound, to reassure, to disturb, and to subvert. If only the rest of the book had been as good as "The Puzzle-Game," this might have been a keeper. As it is I hesitate to recommend it even to completists.
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Murder She Wrote: A Study of Agatha Christie's FictionThis book explores the inter-relationships between Agatha Christie and her works to seek the wholeness in the Christie experience. The authors perceive an integration in personal experience and moral and aesthetic values between the woman and her art.
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