Charm of animated algebra

Detective fiction satisfies two kinds of readers. The one who cries out ‘Wow’ when the murderer is revealed and is happiest when his theories are shot to pieces by the detective in a French, Belgian, English, Swedish or Scottish accent. The second, who says ‘Aha’ since everything merely confirms his own suspicions. One looks for surprise, the other for corroboration.

Style is the enemy of the development from the act to its perpetrator. So are back stories; these merely slow down the flow. The best, in the evocative phrase of Francis Wyndham, write “animated algebra”. Agatha Christie, the queen of them all, in his words, “dares us to solve a basic equation buried beneath a proliferation of irrelevancies. By the last page, everything should have been eliminated except for the motive and identity of the murderer; the elaborate working-out, apparently too complicated to grasp, is suddenly reduced to satisfactory simplicity.”

There is something about detective fiction that unites people. Besides soccer reports, it is the one genre that is read by the semi-literate with passion and the intellectual without embarrassment. Umberto Eco compared it to philosophy because both ask the same fundamental question: Whodunnit? “The charm of the genre,” wrote WH Auden, a fan, “has nothing to do with literature: it is essentially magical and its effect is cathartic.” Edmund Wilson, however, called it “sub-literary” and “between a trivial pursuit and a wildly shameful addiction”. Nearly seven decades ago he wrote an essay in The New Yorker, Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? Fans of detective fiction have been publishing counter arguments ever since. Christie, not surprisingly, has copped most of the criticism on behalf of her tribe. Wilson called her writing “mawkish and banal”.

Raymond Chandler wrote: “And there is a scheme of Agatha Christie’s featuring M Hercule Poirot, that ingenious Belgian who talks in a literal translation of schoolboy French, wherein, by duly messing around with his ‘little grey cells’, M Poirot decides that nobody on a certain sleeper could have done the murder alone, therefore everybody did it together, breaking the process down into a series of simple operations, like assembling an egg beater. This is the type that is guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a halfwit could guess it.”

It was left to the contemporary French writer Michel Houellebecq to give it all a nudge towards balance with the declaration that “She understands the ‘sin of despair’” and calling one of her works a “strange, poignant book; there are deep waters, with powerful undercurrents.”

With sales of over two billion copies of her books, Christie stands alone.

Some of Christie’s plots are unworkable; occasionally she feels the pressure of having created a Belgian hero (a confession she puts into the mouth of her fictional alter ego Ariadne Oliver who writes about a Norwegian detective and wonders why).

Perhaps the enduring charm of the Hercule Poirot books lies in their lack of depth. We are given character traits on a need-to-know basis. Poirot is fond of speaking of “psychology”, but he merely mentions it without acting upon it. In a neat reversal of Shakespeare, contemporary events cast their shadows back into the past in many of the mysteries. Someone once calculated that 31 of her victims in 66 novels succumbed to poison. “Poison has a certain appeal,” wrote Christie “it has not the crudeness of the revolver bullet or the blunt instrument.”

So perhaps it is appropriate that poison is the means of dispatching the victims in the latest Hercule Poirot mystery, The Monogram Murders, and events in the past both lead to the murders and bring events to their inevitable-yet-surprising end. At her best, Christie satisfied both kinds of readers, the ones who wanted surprise and those who paid for inevitability.

Written nearly four decades after Christie’s death by Sophie Hannah, a more literary writer struggling to punch below her weight, The Monogram Murders is both deeply satisfying and mildly irritating.

The plot is one Christie herself might have conjured up, and even if Poirot lacks the energy and wit of some of his best cases (the story is set in 1920s London), it is still remarkable for the manner in which Hannah has immersed herself in Christieana — peppering the book with Poirot’s “schoolboy French”, creating a brand new character to tell the story, leaving enough clues to confuse the reader.

The schoolboy French is irritating — but that probably says more about the reader (in this case, me) than about the writer. We want our Bertie Woosters and Hercule Poirots to retain the mannerisms whether their books are written by the original authors, or, as has happened recently, the likes of Sebastian Faulks and Hannah. Yet when we see that in print, we claim it is a cop out.

What is genuinely irritating, however, is the drawn-out denouement, some 70 pages long, one-fifth of the book. Brevity has to be the soul of revelation.

The essence of a Christie mystery is its simplicity. Complications are introduced only to throw the reader off track, and make it difficult for him to distinguish between what is essential and what is merely incidental. It is a game in which readers co-operate, or need to, in order to enjoy the book.

As we grow older, certain authors we read — and enjoyed — in our childhood and youth place themselves beyond criticism. In my case, the list includes Christie, PG Wodehouse, GK Chesterton, RK Narayan, Arthur Koestler, Neville Cardus, Martin Gardner and a few others. It is difficult to be objective about such writers who provided hours and hours of joy not just reading them, but re-reading them too.

As for detective fiction’s big sweep, here’s John Updike: “Nothing in Agatha Christie’s brilliantly compact, stylised and efficient mysteries suggests that larger ambitions would have served her; the genre in its lean, classic English form fit her like a cat burglar’s thin, black glove.”

Give me animated algebra any time.

The author is Editor, Wisden India Almanack