Monday 4 February 2013

agatha christie

The unsurpassed queen of detective fiction!All children born in the 1950-80 period were nurtured on a diet of Enid Blyton,Agatha Christie,PG Wodehouse,Erle Stanley Gardner,Arthur Conon Doyle and later Hardy Boys& Nancy Drew.It used to be a competition between boys to see who had read more!If Indians today can speak and write better English than the British,it is in no small measure due to these geniuses!
Agatha Christie ignited our taste for the mysterious! Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot were our heroes.I dont remember having left an Agatha Christie mystery read half-way.Studies,food,sleep,games,everything took a back-seat while reading an AC book.Every book was an adventure and an inquiry into the human psyche.The Murder on the Orient Express,And then there were none,10 little nigers,Witness for the prosecution,Murder on the Nile etc are some of her outstanding books. She wrote at a time when it was not the fashion to write for the movies or TV.The audience was the essentially middle-class people all over the world who were avid book lovers.At that time writing was an art and not a profession.It needed tremendous knowledge and grasp of world affairs to be able to write a mystery novel. Her popularity was so wide-spread that Hercule Poirot's obituary was published in NYT when Curtains was published!
Since Agatha Christie was born in Victorian England, she had very high moral values. She stubbornly refused to bow to the needs of the market-place or appeal to baser instincts. Her bottom line was always that a criminal must face the consequences of his actions and justice must prevail.There is a Shakespearean streak in all her mysteries!
I would appeal to all parents to permit their children to read Agatha Christie books to enable them to become decent and fine human beings!

1 comment:

  1. I simply looove her! her books are "simple" and the humanity there is "simple" too!

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