Tomorrow will be the fiftieth anniversary of Agatha Christie’s death and even today her novels are a jewel. In an era obsessed with trauma and true crime, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple – his literary heroes – stubbornly go against the grain by recounting everyday evil, with a sly smile. The many biographies concerning her say that she began writing on a bet with her sister, writing the story of a crime in an English manor in October 1920 – «Poirot a Styles Court» – and becoming, one book after another, the queen of crime fiction, to the point that in England the fashion for «A Christie for Christmas» broke out, that is, giving one of her novels to put under the tree.
The numbers are mind-boggling – over two billion copies sold, translations into more than a hundred languages - but they only partially explain the phenomenon. Its strength does not lie in the rankings, but in a silent modernity, often underestimated. In his novels, crime never shows off and violence almost always remains off-screen. The crime disturbs the order of a family or a small community (“The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”; “Murder on the Orient Express”; “Ten Little Indians”) creating an intimate mystery, never violent or, worse, splatter.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller comes from a wealthy family that fell into poverty. She was a volunteer nurse during the First World War, working in dispensaries, studying drugs and handling poisons, building a practical skill that would become a strength. In his books, poison is a silent, precise and ruthless weapon, the perfect signature of his detective stories, ideal for all ages, as demonstrated by the release scheduled for March 31st of «Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. The most beautiful cases chosen and presented by Marco Malvaldi” (Mondadori, target 11+). Agatha Christie has built a form of education on the gaze, inviting the reader to observe, to doubt, not to stop at the first impression, not without irony. His novels do not ask for empathy for the murderer but train in complexity and do so with only apparent lightness.
From “Poirot on the Nile” to “Bodies in the Sun”, each novel is built according to strict rules: all the clues are before the reader’s eyes, no unfair tricks, no solutions imposed from above. The final twist is a game of logic which with the detective Hercule Poirot – gourmet and eccentric observer – becomes an open challenge: could you do better than him? But if Poirot is the mind that demands order, Miss Marple is the gaze that scrutinizes the details and in both, at the center of the page, we find the human being with all his weaknesses.
Years pass but new translations continue to multiply (Giunti republishes «The Strange Death of the Admiral» on January 14) and the series inspired by his books («The Seven Quadrants», with Helena Bonham Carter and Martin Freeman, will arrive on Netflix on January 15). Another peculiarity is the fact that many of his most famous novels are set in microcosms in which relationships are compressed to the point of becoming explosive. It is a narrative geography that is captured, for Giulio Perrone’s beautiful series «Passaggi di dogana», in «In England with Agatha Christie» by Melania Guarda Ceccoli (from 16 January), traveling through houses, hotels, islands, stations and gardens linked to the writer. A curious journey to the places that fueled her imagination, giving her a daily, almost domestic dimension.
Christie never indulged in worldliness but her private life belies the reassuring image of the “tea lady”. The failure of his first marriage, his mysterious disappearance between 3 and 14 December 1926 and the emotional crisis that followed marked a profound fracture. As Lucy Worsley clearly shows in “The Secret Life of Agatha Christie” (Salani), that escape was not a whim, but an identity collapse. Her second marriage to the archaeologist Max Mallowan took her away from England, to the excavation sites of the Middle East, following her spouse’s passions. But among deserts, tents and hotels overlooking the Nile, Christie refines an even more detached, almost anthropological gaze.
Reread today, Agatha Christie appears surprisingly contemporary and her books are still perfect. From his sharp pen issues of class, money, power and gender emerge, without ever rhetoric and without boring the reader, offering a symbolic order that today appears almost radical: the idea that chaos can be traversed, understood, deciphered and, finally, defeated with all due respect to the many narrators who glorify the morbidity of serial killers.
Fifty years after her death, Agatha Christie reminds us with clarity and healthy humor that crime often arises where we least expect it: in everyday life, in the family, in the mind of the person with whom we share our bed. Because everyone remains an enigma to the gaze of others… and only Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple are infallible.