Why Agatha, Amelia, and Russell?

Between the end of June and August 7th, 2019, I read fourteen Agatha Christie books. I did this because it somehow seemed imprudent to read only thirteen Agatha Christie books. Exact number aside,  this glut was inspired by my finally deciding to listen to a biography of that greatest of mystery writers—which I had had sitting in my Audible library for at least a year (probably longer)—and realizing as I was doing so, that I had really only read two Agatha Christies in my life thus far. This seemed a terrible oversight. I think I am well on my way to correcting it.

When I was in high school, our acting company did a production of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. I played Ms. Emily Brent complete with grey hair, spectacles and knitting. (I learned to knit for the show, and proceeded to make scarves as gifts for everyone I knew. I still can’t knit anything more complicated than a scarf, but there you go.) I vaguely remember we had a(n extremely dashing) British foreign exchange student that year, and he was given the part of the Judge. I believe he was the first to catch the flu at the beginning of tech week, and before we knew it, one by one, we all went down. Scottish Play be damned, beware theatrical productions of Agatha Christie’s work!

Perhaps it was because of that bout of flu, or simply because And Then There Were None truly terrified me in the reading of it, that I didn’t spend more time with Agatha’s work on the page. I did certainly always enjoy her work on the stage when Houston’s Alley Theatre staged their summer chills each year. I also thoroughly enjoyed Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express in 2017. So much so that I did go and read that book (or rather, listened to it, with Dan Stevens reading—it was lovely).

This casual relationship of mine with the undisputed master of the cozy mystery novel came as such a shock to me simply because cozy mystery novels happen to be my very favorite type of reading. Especially British ones. Aside from the Harry Potter books, The Children of Green Knowe, and The Historian (which I suppose could be considered a cozy—if more gothic-leaning—mystery), my most-read favorites are Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series and Laurie R. King’s Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell mysteries. Both of these series fall very firmly in the British cozy mystery genre. It would have seemed only logical for me to gravitate from Amelia Peabody and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie, and yet, until 2019, I didn’t. I could say, perhaps, it was for the lack of a central hero or heroine to tie the stories all together, but with Hercule Poirot and Ms. Marple in mind, I’m afraid that argument doesn’t work. I have no excuse except to say that now I am catching up on lost time.

In Laura Thompson’s 2007 biography of Dame Agatha, the question understandably arises: why is Agatha Christie, author of relatively short, cozy British mystery novels, the most published author in all of history behind only Shakespeare and the Bible? It is an interesting question. Especially interesting to me as I looked back over my 2019 “Read” list and saw that twenty-six of the thirty-three books listed on it were, in fact, cozy mystery novels. Nine of which I’d read before. What gives?

Thomspon argues that Agatha created not so much riveting, complex and believable plots, but puzzles. Not only that, but she gives you all the pieces as you go so that, if you can see past all the red herrings, you can, in fact, solve the puzzle by yourself before the solution is revealed at the end. Like our modern-day police procedural shows, they’re games. And they’re safe because we know there is a solution and that we will be given it, wrapped and tied nicely with a bow, even if we (or as Agatha would say, ‘one’) can’t figure it out. Puzzles are nice. So are neat endings. But then, in my case, why in the world do I keep going back and rereading a thing when I’ve already solved the puzzle?

Both the Amelia Peabody and Mary Russell mysteries (and The Historian as well) provide some really excellent armchair traveling to exciting places in bygone times. I do love to travel, and I also love history, so that helps. Some of Christie’s Poirots dive into the travel thing as well, and yet, my favorite of the Christies I think are actually the Marples. So the travel is certainly a draw, but obviously not the complete answer.

I also reread the Amelia Peabodys so often because I adore Amelia, and her relationship with her husband, Emerson. I also really relate to Russell in the Mary Russell books and can’t help but liking Sherlock Holmes wherever he happens to appear. Ms. Marple is also charming, but certainly not as compelling as the others, so perhaps character isn’t the central hook either.

What is it then that ties these books to my other favorites? The Children of Green Knowe, and the Harry Potters for example?

In the opening pages of her Christie biography, Laura Thompson comments on the writer's lifelong idealization of and longing for her childhood home, how she ‘wept like a child’ when that house was torn down towards the end of her life (a full twenty years after it had been sold), and how that nagging sense of loss (and the house itself) found its way into so many of her novels. Another argument for the long-lasting popularity of Agatha’s books is that her characters are very recognizable types and the plots feel like they could be unfolding anywhere, making it easy for myriad audiences to immerse themselves in the world of the books, but I think there is something to that initial idea of home.

In The Children of Green Knowe, a seven year old boy travels to a magical old house where he meets his fantastic old Granny for the first time, uncovers the mysteries of the house’s ghosts, and simultaneously discovers his place amongst his family in a house he can call home.

In the Harry Potter books, an orphan boy learns he is a wizard, goes to a magical castle where he not only learns magic, but—over the course of seven books—becomes a real part of a wizarding family and finds belonging and home in the magical world.

In the Mary Russell books, another orphan moves from America to a Sussex farmhouse where she meets Sherlock Holmes and becomes first his apprentice and then his wife. And while the pair travels literally around the world solving mysteries, they are always able to return to a very solid and comfortable home in Sussex where Mrs. Hudson has the newspapers stacked by the fire and the kettle on.

In the Amelia Peabody books, a brilliant young woman’s distant father dies, she inherits packets of money and decides to travel the world. She makes it as far as Egypt where she meets and falls in love with an intrepid archaeologist. They spend twenty books solving crimes, building a physical home in Luxor, and assembling a ragtag but entirely perfect and lovable family to live in it from the myriad people who pass through their lives.

The Agatha Christies don’t necessarily have the same long character arcs, but, nonetheless, my favorites thus far have been peopled by a lovable cast of disparate characters who, all together, inhabit a place and make it very truly cozy and like home. 

When I was reading the Agatha Christie biography, I was in the midst of a slew of school-group tours. Their routes took me repeatedly up to Concord, MA, where I would inevitably spend an hour sitting on a pleasant bench outside of Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, waiting for the students to finish their tour. Orchard House is only one of a very many houses the Alcott family occupied, and yet is the one considered to be the inspiration for the March home in Louisa’s beloved Little Women. While it seems many of the middle- and high-school-aged students I bring to the Orchard House these days are woefully unfamiliar with Little Women, the parents and teachers on these trips are usually most excited by this stop. The story of the March family is a story of family and loss, but also very strongly of home. Even though the Alcotts didn’t occupy any house for a long stretch of years, and even though many of the guests visiting Orchard House today have never physically set foot either in the house or in Massachusetts before, Louisa brought that house and the family that occupied it so fervently alive in Little Women, and thus in the imaginations of her readers, that for so many, to visit Orchard House is, in a way, to come home.

In a similar way, reading Little Women—or any other beloved and familiar book—is a way to come home. The Harry Potters and Green Knowe, the Amelia Peabodys, and the Mary Russells, have all been there to see me through trying times, to provide a sense of familiarity and comfort when the world seems adrift. And that is really one of the very nice things about books: even if things change drastically in the course of the plot, one can always go back again to the beginning and find things exactly as they were before. Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth will always be celebrating Christmas in Concord. And I will always know exactly where to go to  find Molly Weasley busy in the Burrow’s kitchen cooking breakfast for Harry, Ron, George, and Fred. And perhaps that is one of the greatest draws of good literature, because, while some families are able to preserve their homes through generations, for most of us, that is not an option. We can’t go home again. And even for those who are able time and again to return to a physical place, minimally changed by the years, they themselves are often changed, and so, from visit to visit, their experience of the place changes too. I suppose the same is true of rereading books. Going back a second, third or tenth time, you are reading with the knowledge of what will happen, and that changes the experience as well.

And yet, it seems to be a universally human desire to go back home, even if it or we are different. I dream often of my grandparents and their house, the place I felt most at home and to which I can never return. Always in these dreams I know these people and this place will be gone again at any moment, and yet I cling and hope that this time the dream might turn out differently. I think I am afraid somehow that I’ve lost the feeling of that place forever. That home is lost. Like Agatha, I continue to search for it. Not so much the place itself that I know is gone, but the feeling of it I’m hoping to find somewhere new.

What is that feeling, exactly? What really makes a place home? Is it all the familiar things gathered together? (All our "stuff," as George Carlin would say?) Is it the people that occupy it? Collected memories? A sense of safety and ease? A mix of all of these things? I have had the great good fortune in life to be a "nester," and have been able to quickly make myself feel comfortable in many different places. But though I can make myself feel "at home," I have found that is not exactly the same feeling as being home. I have my favorite books, my comfy chair, my Grannie’s couch and coffee table, my tea, and my kitties. And yet, while all of this is here, and my fiancé is here, and we are leading a very happy life in this apartment, this place does not feel like home in the way Grannie’s house did. Is it because it is not ours? That we share walls and hallways (and a washing machine) with neighbors? Or would that all meld into a nice comfortable ease if we lived here long enough? What is the recipe? The magic formula to make a space a real home?

Perhaps that’s the question Agatha Christie was trying to answer again and again in her writing. Underneath the puzzles, maybe she was really trying to find her way home. And maybe the same can be said for J.K. Rowling, and L.M. Boston, Laurie R. King, and even Louisa May Alcott. Writing a place into being.

Earlier this week I woke up from another dream of my Grannie’s house. In that confused moment between dream and fully waking, I found myself thinking I really was lying again in my room at that house in Dallas. "Oh," I thought, "I don’t quite remember those pictures being on the wall just there, but yes, this is it. This is home. It hasn’t gone after all." And then I shook off the sleep and realized that I was not in Grannie’s house but in my own bed in this apartment in Massachusetts, with my fiancé and the kitties sound asleep around me. My foggy brain had recognized this as home. So maybe it isn't completely lost after all.