--- jacquesdebierue <
jacquesdebierue@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Many of her characters are nasty people. While
she
> does not give them
> a proper life, they don't strike me as
purely
> invented puppets either.
> It's a strange world if you come from
> hardboiledland, but still
> recognizably human. The emphasis on the puzzle
is
> clear, but the
> puzzle would not do its job on the reader if
the
> characters were too
> unbelievable. Now, if you are talking
about
> Christie's England versus
> the real England of folks in the streets, I am
sure
> that the distance
> is enormous.
**************************************************** Compare
any of Agatha Christie's Jane Marple novels to any of Ruth
Rendell's books. They all take place for the most part in
English villages. There the similarity ends. Ruth Rendell
shows you the faces the villagers put on for each other, and
then the dark secrets that go on behind closed doors. The
Rendell sociopath and the Rendell cop are multi-dimentional.
There are whole lives going on behind and around the crime
she's actually writing about. Christie's characters are all
one-dimentional by comparison.
Likewise, Joseph Wambaugh's book, THE BLOODING, takes place
in an English village. It's true crime but it reads like a
novel, made all the creepier by the fact that it happened and
was the first murder case to be solved by DNA processing. I
learned more about the life of an English village from that
one book by Wambaugh than I learned in the 20 or so Christie
books I've read in my life. I go so far as to wonder if
Christie ever actually lived in an English village. If she
did, did she interact with the people at all or was she just
the famous old writer who lived on the hill?
For me, Christie was a transition from the Hardy Boys to
Dashiel Hammett. I was about fourteen years old when I moved
from Christie to Hammett and Chandler. She looked pretty pale
in comparison. I don't mean just the edgieness of the latter.
I mean Christie's plots are dull. The solutions to her
mysteries are convoluted and hokey. I can remember a Poirot
novel in which the clue that gave it all away was that a
fourteen-year-old girl's legs were too well developed and she
was actually 25 and a murderer. Aunt Agatha should come
around where I live. There are lots of 14 year-olds who's
legs would do credit to a 25-year-old woman. I doubt they're
killing anyone, however. No one's missing. I thought that was
an unlikely cheat on Ms. Christie's part.
Patrick King
____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo!
Mobile. Try it now.
http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 23 Apr 2008 EDT