When murderers knew their place

Was Agatha Christie a good writer? The American critic Edmund Wilson was one of the unhappy few who thought not. In 1944 he wrote a famous essay on Christie whose contentious (and contemptuous) tone can already be inferred from the rhetorical question which its title poses: ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’.

That title, in fact, could not have got it more hopelessly wrong. Surely Wilson was capable of understanding that, of course, nobody cares who killed Roger Ackroyd. That’s the point, for goodness’ sake! Agatha Christie irrelevant? Of course she is, but that again is precisely the glory of her work (relevance we can get at home) and it’s why the recent attempts of naive television adapters to make it ‘relevant’, by saddling poor Miss Marple with a ‘past’, for example, betray a dismaying miscomprehension of how Christie’s whodunits function.

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Just pronounce her name. The world it instantly conjures up — and it’s worth remembering that she’s one of the very few contemporary English writers, of whatever stamp, to have created an indelible, enduring mytho-iconography — is an ideal rather than a realistic realm, an English (middle-class, Home Counties and, alas, racist and anti-Semitic) utopia, populated by characters who bear the same relation to real Englishmen and women as the lions and wolves rampant on coats-of arms to the living beasts they are designed to personify. Clichés and all, Christie’s dramatis personae and their environment are, in a word, heraldic and she had the gift of depicting them, as her latest biographer, Laura Thompson, expresses it, in one of her better phrases, with ‘a shining simplicity’. And the murders? They’re the pills that help the sugar go down.

I’ve taken rather a long time to arrive at Thompson’s biography; but then, she takes 356 pages before she’s finally prepared to address the vital question of her subject’s status as a writer.