I was just reading the “Murder on the Orient Express” thread, and it got me wondering if, in Christie’s own time, anyone thought it was kind of ghoulish that she used the details of real people’s lives in her books?
I realize that Law & Order did this on an almost weekly basis for 20 years, but sensibilities were a little more delicate then, and an international best-seller was different from just another evanescent TV show episode.
Plus, the Lindbergh kidnapping was notorious. The Lindbergh child was “the nation’s baby” for quite some time.
And then you look at Gene Tierney, whose privacy was sort of invaded for The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. The story of her daughter was something that the tabloids knew about, but that she tried to keep semi-private, and Christie dredged it up again, during Tierney’s life, the life of the child concerned, and Tierney’s other child. As far as we know, Tierney never had murderous intentions toward the person who gave her Rubella, but the book suggested she did.
Did the public just let this go at the time, or were there any reviews of the books that suggested maybe this wasn’t quite such a nice thing to do?
I didn’t realize she recycled real-life crimes in her plots, but Agatha Christie certainly had a ruthless side. I just got through reading Halloween Party, where she brutally kills off two small children. And in other books (I won’t name them to avoid spoiling anything), she has (supposedly) respectable people committing extra murders simply to cover their main one.
I’m doubly impressed with her dark side because I started reading her after consuming a bunch of Ngaio Marsh mysteries. Marsh (a better writer, in my opinion) would never stray so far from gentility in her plots. You can take the wholesome young couples in her books off your suspect list immediately, and the kindly nurses and clergymen are what they seem. Also a lot of her victims kind of had it coming. But not with Christie!
Isaac Asimov wrote a number of real authors (including himself) into Murder at the ABA. None of them were particularly integral to the plot, though: I don’t know how significant the real-life characters were in Christie’s works.
I think that’s probably why she was so popular. She really pushed the limits for her own time, which is why her books still hold up so well today, and her writing is really very good. It may not be beautifully constructed writing ever, but it is very clever, and original; and remember that she came on the heels of the Victorians. Next to them her sparse compactness must have been a relief. There were people who saw Thomas Hardy as new releases, who also saw Christie’s early work as new releases. She really could pack a lot into a single sentence. That’s another reason her books still sell so well in 2017.
Very significant. The person in “The Mirror Crack’d” who parallels the life of Gene Tierney is (as the OP implies) the murderer, and the victim parallels a real person who wronged Tierney enormously. I never thought of this in this light before, but it is rather revolting (even Law and Order generally changed details considerably for their ripped from the headlines stories).
If Tierney and her daughter Daria had been dead, it mightn’t have seemed so bad, but they were both alive at the time.
IIRC, Tierney had to make a public statement rather late in the game that she bore no ill will toward the woman who gave her Rubella. She neither new Tierney was pregnant, nor that Rubella was dangerous to a fetus. But Tierney was moved to do this as a result of the book.
But that’s the only way the detective can find the killer! The original murder was so carefully planned, with maybe one tiny flaw that someone (not the detective) happens to catch and who therefore also has to die. Then this more ad hoc murder leads to further errors and further murders until the brilliant detective finally catches on. I don’t know if this started with Christie (I seem to recall it in at least a couple of Sherlock Holmes stories, but I’m not a big fan) but she pushed it as far is it would go and then some.
By the way, I had no idea that The Mirror Crack’d was based on Gene Tierney (I didn’t know any details of her life). That is creepy indeed. I wasn’t so bothered about the Lindbergh baby background, lots of the details were changed and I felt like the similarities were all overshadowed by the tour-de-force plot twist.
Christie really did invent so many whodunit plot twist genres, you might say. Just off the top of my head we have
everybody did it, the story narrator did it, the local police inspector did it, Poirot himself did it, I’m probably leaving out some good ones, please feel free to fill them inand I’m really glad for the sake of the puzzles that everyone was always a suspect. Yes, Marsh was a better writer, certainly Rendell was a much better writer even in her Inspector Wexford books, but those books are not primarily puzzles. You care about the characters at least somewhat. Christie is all about the puzzle, and I don’t think anyone I have read did that better.
There’s also
the apparent intended victim did it, in at least three different books, to the point where if there was an unsuccessful attempt at murder, I started looking at the intended victim very closely indeed.
This year I made it a goal to read novels by all of the four “grand dames” of the golden age of British mysteries: Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Dorothy Sayers. As you indicate, there are very good reasons why Christie is the best remembered. She was an excellent, concise writer for sure, but I think her real claim to fame was her creativity and her willingness to do just about anything for the sake of spectacular plot twists. Marsh adhered to a lot more rules in her plots and their resolutions aren’t nearly as outrageous, but she excelled at creating interesting characters. I’m reading Scales of Justice right now, and the cast, especially Nurse Kettle, is so entertaining that I don’t really care which one of them is a murderer.
For me, Sayers and especially Allingham (who I’m starting to really hate) don’t age nearly as well as Christie and Marsh, largely due to their excessively complicated writing styles.
Never read her; stopped after one Allingham. I used to love Sayers…been looking for a secondhand copy of Gaudy Night recently, as I’ve never read any of the Harriet Vanes. I read a ridiculous amount of Christie as a teenager, but feel no interest in picking up any I haven’t read. Oddly, though, I’m always up for a rewatch of the 1945 movie And Then There Were None, and Witness for the Prosecution with Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, and Tyrone Power.
Indeed Marsh was from Enzed. I’ve read a handful of hers and my favorite is Death in a White Tie because it portrays the upper class between the wars so well. I’ve read every Agatha Christie multiple times but don’t enjoy them now. Too much dialog, and to me, very dated (and I love a period piece). Miss Marple over Poirot every time for me.
No. The second modern detective story, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” by Poe was based upon a real murder case. According to the Wikipedia article on the story, this sort of fictionalization was common at the time.
As for delicate sensibilities, this was the time of “Trial of the Century” and various other sensational tabloid tales. Yellow journalism thrived before Christie, and continued to do so all through her life.
Just to add, Ngaio Marsh’s books were reissued not long ago and are easily available, including on Kindle. I second Death in A White Tie; another fave is Killer Dolphin which brings in her interest in theater.
While you can debate the merits of using famous life stories the way that Christie did, she is far from the only person who ever based fictional characters/events on people, without their consent.
William Randolph Hearst was the ‘inspiration’ for Citizen Kane by Orson Welles.
Ayn Rand based the hero of “the Fountainhead”, Howard Roarke, off of Frank Lloyd Wright (and another character from the same book - Gail Wynand - bares more than a passing similarity to Hearst as well.)
Jacqueline Suzann’s “Valley of the Dolls” has caricatures of Ethel Merman (Helen Lawson), Marilyn Monroe (Jennifer North – who dies from an overdose of barbituates just like Monroe did), Judy Garland (Neely O’Hara), Dean Martin (Tony Polar), etc.
Armisted Maupin’s “Tales of the City” novels had a recurring character identified only in the story as “_____ _____” and is a closeted Hollywood movie star who hosts lavish gay male pool parties at his home. That was Rock Hudson, who really did that.
In all these cases, the real people involved (well, except for Marilyn) were still alive when the books based on their lives came out. So the practice was hardly unique to Christie. And Rock Hudson was still VERY closeted publicly when Maupin’s books came out.
II can’t fault Christie for using real people and events as inspiration for fictional characters and plots since virtually every fiction writer does so. The Sun Also Rises is based very closely on the real life experiences and affairs of Hemingway and his friends, including very personal details and painful affairs. He used dialogue verbatim, and in the first draft, even used actual names. It makes it no less a great work of literature.
Christie read about Tierney’s experience–with the heavy publicity it received, it would have been hard not to–thought, “What if?” and developed a novel out of it, complete with fictional characters and murders that never happened in real life.
Christie is one of those authors who are absolutely famous for a reason. Do yourself a treat and read some Poirot short stories sometime. Her writing isn’t lofty, but it isn’t bland or shallow either. She writes good, clever entertainment.
A comparison to Law & Order isn’t entirely out-of-line, but I think she was sharper, less lurid, and simply more fun.
Yeah, but in Strong Poison she has Lord Peter pawing all over her. I thought I would start with Gaudy Night because Harriet is the center of attention.