Agatha Christie and Anglophilia
by Anna Keesey
In the summer of 1976, the bicentennial mystique emanating from Washington D.C. made it all the way to the tiny goofy town of Monmouth, Oregon, where I was busy being fourteen. American flag pants proliferated, a happening addition to a zeitgeist already sparkling with sideburns, Ziggy cartoons, and two-dollar bills. I wore a flag-themed bracelet with my satin shorts and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, and I was as big a fan of fireworks, celebration, and the pursuit of happiness as the next kid. But that summer my loyalty had been stolen, if temporarily, by another country. If my physical life was lived in Volkswagen microbuses, the Dairy-L drive-in, and Crider’s Variety store, in my mind I repeatedly took tea, hunted grouse, rode slow-chuffing trains and wore a maid’s white pinafore. It was but too true: I had become an Anglophile, and it was all Agatha Christie’s fault.
I had recently fallen into my mother’s copy of Ten Little Indians—probably the first book I’d ever read through that starred exclusively adult characters—and instead of it being dull or embarrassing or unpleasantly morally ambiguous, this little mystery was alluringly simple and crisp, one tiny scene following the next in rapid order, one-dimensional humans characterized by stereotypes intelligible even to un-read, un-travelled me: sanctimonious judge, uptight spinster, louche playboy. And the setting—ah, delicious—magnificent house, remote island, an unseen host with a gleeful fetish for nursery rhyme (didn’t Christie prognosticate the textually obsessive serial killer portrayed repeatedly in the last twenty years?) And then the puzzle itself: how could this locked room have been opened? What was the secret?
Now, though, it is clear to me that Dame C., though seducing me into enjoyment of the erotics of the class system and of casual midcentury racism, was otherwise a great mentor. For what do we learn from the well-made series fiction, in which a writers uses the same handful of materials again and again, each time in a new variation, tooled differently.
I checked the books—paperbacks—out of the library by the double-handfuls, and I suspect did little else but read, all day, every day. I pedaled back to the library, heels aslip in my Dr. Scholl’s, agog with plots, with relationships, with villages, great houses, vicars, inheritances, and poison pen letters, with Egypt and London and Leeds, with Bentleys, illegitimate children, false identities, actors, doctors, hotels, and champagne. At the time—oh, the blessed absorption of pre-professional reading—I attempted not the least analysis of what passed before me. Now, though, it is clear to me that Dame C., though seducing me into enjoyment of the erotics of the class system and of casual midcentury racism, was otherwise a great mentor. For what do we learn from the well-made series fiction, in which a writers uses the same handful of materials again and again, each time in a new variation, tooled differently. I learned first, of course, that the culprit was always the least likely person. But myriad qualities made a character least likely: having been suspected and cleared early in the book, for instance, or having been apparently elsewhere at the vital moment, or incapacitated or even dead; being a child, or the narrator of the story itself, or not oneself at all, but one’s sister. Who had done it? Everyone had done it, or no one had done it, because it wasn’t a murder at all, but a natural death.
The novels were each a different turn of the same kaleidoscope, colorful flakes of family, money, romance, and espionage in a pattern pleasurably fresh, pleasurably familiar. It was thus revealed to me that Christie was arranging the narrative, rather than uttering it. To my great benefit as a writer, it also became clear to me every character has a past, or several pasts, even a child; that people misinterpret one another’s behavior regularly; that a few letters on a scrap of paper may mean everything, if they are the right letters.
And the books were thrilling. All these years later I can still watch the hair on my arms rise if I think of a certain pearl choker, worn by a pleasant old woman, a certain promise of ice cream by an aunt to her niece, a certain phrase—“monkey’s paws” —floating up a stairwell. The thrill was in seeing what the unmoored detail or fragment of memory meant: the narratives were arranged to bring me to a literal moment of truth, when chaos coalesced into meaning, and the nature of reality was revealed.
Not so long afterward, it now seems, I was a young high school teacher coping with a group of tense angry boys at the back the room, boys who had never said a word, to my knowledge, about anything other than LL Cool J and Flavor Flav. I was desperate to intrigue them. I visited the half-empty book room at the school, and found there a stack of battered copies of Ten Little Indians. It wasn’t To Kill A Mockingbird or the Miracle Worker, I knew, and it wasn’t The Grapes of Wrath. But we read it together. During one silent reading period, at least five of them reached the finale, clutched their heads, threw down the book, and interrupted their absorbed friends by inquiring, “Are you done yet? Are you done? Tell me when you’re done.”
The day after we finished, the three most difficult dudes in the back row staggered into class, burdened. I moseyed back to see what was happening. The boys sat there proud, dignified, over towers of mysteries, huge, hard-backed, glossy in cellophane covers: Sleeping Murder, Crooked House, Nemesis, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. They were fourteen years old. On the strength of their love for Ten Little Indians, they had cleaned out the public library.
Brits for the win, again. More tea, Vicar?
Anna Keesey is a graduate of Stanford University and of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and has held residencies at MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and Provincetown. Keesey teaches English and creative writing at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. Her novel Little Century was published by FSG in June 2012.
