This freezing week made comfort reading an absolute imperative and I abandoned anything too demanding for the wonderful comfort of a well built country house where strange goings on, lead to murder and the arch intervention of a detective whose predatory ‘eye’ is as attentive as a hungry bird of prey. Details, maps and illustrations of burnt documents conspire to lull the reader into a sleepy passivity that is challenged by the revelation of Hercule Poirot’s veiled briliance. We can never know what this reader of humanity knows. His tidy mind seeks out the anomalous and rearranges chronology so that what is becomes slippery and profoundly untrustworthy.
This was Christie’s first novel, written whilst involved in her unhappy first marriage. As a novel of the ‘Golden Age’ of Detective fiction it gives ample representation to the art of reading ‘signs’ and I found the novel’s accumulative weight of detail a perfect balance to the cold! Sometimes like the overwhelm of Milton Eriksson, I felt almost ‘entranced’ by this detail which brought about satisfying sleep!
I am fascinated by the capacity of a Detective writer to carry so many details forward in their narratives and their consummate ability to redirect an ostensibly plausible narrative in another direction. Instability proilferates until the healing sesne and ‘eye’ of the Detective returns the fallen unstable world to stability and a more serene relationship between the ‘sign’ and its meaning.
I think Stig Larsson may be next…
