Christie quickly cleans up the emotional mess (the bereaved lover has another admirer waiting in the wings the grieving parent will soon die of cancer and suffer no more) or avoids it altogether by keeping the unhappiest person offstage and mentioned only in passing, if at all. Husbands and wives lose each other, parents their children and vice versa. But rarely does the moment come after the killer has been unmasked that everybody’s life falls apart. Much of her ability to surprise comes from her willingness to make anybody the killer. Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver may live to bring young lovers together Christie is never afraid to tear them asunder. Yet it has taken me many years of living my own life to find the depth of emotion in her writing.Īs a plotter, she is ruthless. I more than love Agatha Christie I’ve made a study of her. With two exceptions ( Passenger to Frankfurt and Postern of Fate), I’ve read every book at least twice and most of them 3 – 6 times. I’ve been reading Christie for fifty years. At any rate, while I know many of my readers and blogging friends prefer their crime stories free of sentiment, for the rest of you, I thought I would offer a signpost draped in flowers of books by my four favorite authors that mystified me in that good ol’ GAD way andmoved me in the mysterious ways that the best of writers do. Perhaps the fact that my tastes coincide with this historical time is just that – a coincidence.
Yet all of the authors on my list were definitely Golden Age authors, and most of them were, first and foremost, puzzle crafters throughout their lengthy, prolific careers. It made me wonder if I should be focusing my talents on the SilverAge, where the psychological element began to crowd out the pure puzzle. Not all of them address the war directly – some not at all – but it seems highly likely that living through this international cataclysm had a profound effect on these writers. Of great interest to me was that as I was compiling a list of books that fit this category, I noted that almost every one of them was written in the 1940’s, specifically during the final stages and aftermath of World War II. In truth, I’m an old softie, so it’s no surprise that I’m drawn to those titles and that many of them have found their way to the top of my favorites lists. While it’s true that most of the old classics appeal to the brain and tend to minimize matters of the heart, even the most puzzle-oriented of authors occasionally slip in something that tugs at your heartstrings. Dale Carnegie said: “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion.” Try applying this truism to the classic mystery, and you can perhaps see why some people turn away from the tendency of these stories to shortchange the emotional aspects of murder, while others are drawn to the emphasis on puzzle out of 1) a desire to exercise their own little grey cells, or 2) a need to put aside the emotional maelstrom of the real world and reside in a more ordered, less messy society for a few hours.
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