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[JIM DOHERTY]

No messages from anyone?  All day?

Has that ever happened before?  Anyway, just to get something going, and to break in this section which has never been used since moving to the new neighborhood, I've been reading Dame Agatha's Hercule Poirot's Casebook.  Mrs. Christie's particular magic has usually escaped me, though I find I've generally liked the movies and TV shows based on her work better than the novels.

However, last year I read And Then There Were None for a convention I was attending that was using that book as its thematic center and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.   This despite knowing the ending, having seen two of the film versions. 

Maybe, I thought, it was not the writing or the stories, but the character of Poirot I found hard to take at such length.  So I thought I'd try some of the short stories and see if I enjoyed his company any better in smaller doses. 

So far I have.

Maybe I'll get to like Mrs Christie enough that I'll even try a Miss Marple.

Has anyone else ever found that a character who seemed tedious at novel-length was more palatable in short fiction?

[B L McAllister]

Has anyone else ever found that a character that seemed tedious at novel-length was more palatable in short fiction?

This isn't exactly the same thing, but it's another example of "change of heart."  My first Lilian Jackson Braun was "The Cat Who Saw Red."  I didn't like it much, though I plowed all the way through.  Then I ignored the lady and her two semi-psychic cats.  However, one day my ever-lovin-blue-eyed [a figure of speech derived from Pogo; hers aren't really blue] spouse read me a couple of particularly interesting paragraphs of a Lilian Jackson Braun (I forget which, but it doesn't matter), and since I was intrigued she ended up reading the whole thing to me.  I liked it a lot.  So after that LJB's work became "read-aloud" only, and we've liked all of them.  The weird part is that eventually we got around to "The Cat Who Saw Red" again, and I liked it also.  Jim, you aren't likely to be especially sympathetic to this particular author, who overlaps the hard-boiled genre hardly at all, even though she does occasionally allow a "good-guy" to get killed. And I'm not actually recommending that you try to do as we did.  But I figure the phenomenon is relevant.  By the way, we've tried "read-aloud" with some other authors, and quite often that actually appears to spoil a book we both finally turn out to like when we quit messing around and read it silently and individually.  So I guess the secret is simply that, for some idiots (one must beware of referring to oneself in positive or neutral terms, right?) there's a considerable difference between books that do well when read aloud and books that don't--and, of course between the styles of the authors of the respective books.  Whether this observation has any implications for the writing of mysteries I really can't say, since I'm not bright enough to finger any precise characteristics of the two types--nor even to swear that they actually form "types."

[dhparker]

Almost always I prefer books to film.  As I read, I visualize the story in my head and I usually like my own version (made up of the author's actual words) better than "adapted to film" versions.  Even though Dame Agatha fully describes Poirot, I could never "see" him as I read.  But David Suchet saved the day and brought Poirot to life for me.  Now I love the Poirot stories as much as I do the Miss Marples. 

I don't know what the point of this post is, except to help make up for yesterday's lack of posts.  Thanks, Jim, and I'm glad you're beginning to enjoy the Christie books.

Donna

[Ingrid]

I've always liked Poirot, though perhaps not as much as Miss Marple.  But then, I like eccentric characters.
I don't read Dame Agatha any longer because her atmosphere has become dated for me (and maybe seeing the stories on the screen with 30's setting and costumes has something to do with that).
As for short stories vs. novels:  it's in a novel that you can work on character.  But Christie operates with only a few markers and does little character development and no internalizing at all, so perhaps Poirot's repeated idiosyncrasies get tedious in a novel.

Ingrid 

[CathyJ]

The last time I read any Poirot was in a mystery reading group several years ago, and he didn't hold up well for me, but perhaps I should try the short stories.  In the novel we read in the reading group (don't remember which one, now), Poirot struck me as an annoying egomaniac.  I don't remember hating him when I read Christie 30 years earlier.

I liked Miss Marple.

Cathy

[Peg H]

I too am a fan of Miss Marple.  On screen, Helen Hayes has my vote for the best Miss Marple.  I never cared for Poirot either until I watched David Suchet portray him.

Peg H

[Ingrid]

Margaret Rutherford.  By a mile.

Not that she was anything like Miss Marple in the books.  She was what Miss Marple might have been.

[James]

Geraldine McEwan's new interpretation of Miiss Marple on TV here in the UK clicks all the right icons for me. She plays the detective with a knowing smile as if she had a past. In fact, in the new TV series it is stated that she had a lover - and a married one at that - who was killed in World War 1.

I doubt if Miss Marple would have been half so knowing about human nature and what made people tick if she hadn't lived a bit when she was young, and that's why I always found Margaret Rutherford or Joan Hickson so unsatisfactory. They looked as if they had been born dried up and spinsterish.

As the perfect anitidote to Miss Marple, I do enjoy the Agatha Raisin books. Here again we have an unmarried woman (in her 50s) living in a cosy country village solving crimes - but what a difference! Lusting after all the eligible men in the village - cheating in the baking competitions - getting married to her next door neighbour before he jaunts off to France to become a monk - then finding another man to give her a good time.

The books are wickedly good fun.

[B L McAllister]

The last time I read any Poirot was in a mystery reading group several years ago, and he didn't hold up well for me, but perhaps I should try the short stories.  In the novel we read in the reading group (don't remember which one, now), Poirot struck me as an annoying egomaniac.  I don't remember hating him when I read Christie 30 years earlier.

I liked Miss Marple.

Cathy

It's certainly true that Miss Marple is no egomaniac.  However, quite a few of the "standard" fictional detectives are egomaniacs, starting with Sherlock Holmes and certainly including Nero Wolfe.  Just because I can't think of another one right now doesn't mean there aren't any more.  I got over the "annoyance" part while stil  reading Holmes, and eventually decided they were egomaniacs because first of all, their writers did give them unusually capable minds (to say the least), and second, they'd have to be pretty stupid not to notice their own abilities.  (I found them a nice  change from the Superman comics I read as a child: Superman, for all his superpowers, had nothing mental to be egomaniacal about.)

[Matthew S.]

Margaret Rutherford.  By a mile.

Not that she was anything like Miss Marple in the books.  She was what Miss Marple might have been.

Did you know that Dame Agatha did not like Dame Rutherford for the role of Miss Marple.  In fact, she wanted Joan Hickman, who incidently, played a cameo in one of the Rutherford Marple movies.  Years later Christie got her wish - posthumously.

For myself, I have always thought that Gideon Fell would make a great TV movie.  Did you know that John Dickson Carr's Dr. Gideon Fell was based on a real life person?  G. K. Chesterton, author of the Father Brown mysteries.

And for what it's worth, I think David Suchet did for Hercule Poirot what Jeremy Brett did for Sherlock Holmes - made him real.

Matthew S.

[Ingrid]

David Suchet was fine.  I never liked Sherlock Holmes and therefore did not watch the shows. Too much arrogance and a very flat personality.  Mysteries no longer deal with the enigmantic all-knowing detective.

It occurs to me that Dame Rutherford is anything but cozy.  And of course Christie didn't like her. Rutherford made fun of Christie's plots.

Ingrid

[Kathy Wendorff]

Miss Marple is actually not a very cozy character. She sees sin and human frailty in everyone. Murderers are just like her neighbors and relatives -- that's how she solves her mysteries -- except they've gone a bit too far and taken lives. She's often saddened but never shocked by evil-doing.

And at least in the earlier books, other characters refer to her as a nasty prying old cat, and having a Victorian mind "like a sink" -- that is, a sewer -- in spite of her fluffy appearance.

She's my favorite Christie detective.

Kathy W.

[Ingrid]

Yes, I like her, too.  But the constant knitting, gardening, gossiping, prying among the countryhouse and vicarage set with their teas do make those books cozies.  True, Christie remarks on the fact that evil may exist anywhere.  She is, after all, writing about murder and that would otherwise seem rather odd in such other-worldly surroundings and among such mild-mannered people. Part of the appeal is the improbability of her scenarios.

Ingrid

[Kathy Wendorff]

Oh, I agree the stories are cozies. I'm just saying, Miss Marple herself isn't the sweet-natured cozy little old lady some readers (and most of the other characters in the stories) assume she is.

And while the stories are certainly cozy in tone, I do think Christie's whole un-cozy point is that people everywhere are capable of evil. Which is perfectly true -- there are small-town domestic murders all the time, even if they're not as well-plotted as the ones in books.

There's an interesting book on Christie's mysteries ( "A Talent to Deceive; an Appreciation of Agatha Christie" by Robert Barnard ) which points out that she takes an unsentimental approach to her characters and uses readers' sympathies to misdirect them -- the murderer may well turn out to be the likable romantic interest, the comic relief major, even the narrator.

Kathy

[Tosca]

It is common knowledge in England that Agatha Christie rather disliked Poirot and had to be encouraged to write more books about him. She wanted to kill him off quickly but he proved so popular she couldn't.