A short break in St Annes and a brief trip out to Cleveleys and The Works revealed the oddly comforting joys of reading once of the most successful and prolific writers who has ever lived: Agatha Christie! Detail is everywhere. Libraries have fully decribed shelves and studies have french polished tables, french windows onto herbaceous borders and gardens with pleasant views of the local , well attended dusty church. Characters talk slightly stiltedly, or they gush or if they happen to be the killer, they are always too articulate for innocence. Indeed like Shakespeare, there seems to be a link between articulacy and sinfulness. Very ironic surely in a writer?!
But when I return again to Agatha Christie I feel the structure of each chapter- even the security of the metaphorial and literal upholstery starts to relax me. As if I am being taken by the detail and the slow, accumulative progression of plot as it unfolds archly yet inevitably towards resolution – into TRANCE! For since the holiday every time I have picked up Christie I have found myself enjoying the luxury of relaxation, the slow pulse of contentment and then the easy drift of sleep….Christie’s gift, is like that of the cobra and her heroine Miss Jane Marple- she hypnotises her readers into her world with her words!
‘Really, I have no gifts- no gifts at all- except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature.’
Miss Marple’s ‘certain knowledge’ of course renders readers and burly policemen amazed. If ever a character could calibrate the motivations and behaviours of others to an exceptional degree it is Jane Marple. Never has knitting been such a cover for incisive intelligence. Her peculiar attentiveness to the nuances and incongruities of speech and habit outshine Richard Bandler and other gurus of NLP!
I wonder what Darren Brown would do if Miss Jane Marple came for tea? And what would she think of him? !