Month: June 2011

  • A Fond Farewell to the Dame

    Well, kids, that’s it for Agatha Christie. I hope that you found something interesting to use for your own work from this bestsellingest of authors. Stuff that I’ll take away: 1. You don’t have to be all organized in your notebooks. I know that seems like a really silly thing to take away, but I…

  • Two Different Ends to Two Different Series

    I just finished reading Curtain, Poirot’s last case. (I promise I won’t give away the end.) And recently I’d also read Sleeping Murder, which is Marple’s last case. In both cases the books were written years (decades) before they were published. Also in both cases the sleuths are still sharp, still the same old human-observers,…

  • Those Little Bits of Insight

    “‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘that when my time comes, I should be sorry if the only plea I had to offer was that of justice. Because it might mean that only justice would be meted out to me.’”~The Vicar Leonard Clement in Murder at the Vicarage, discussing the necessity of mercy when considering a…

  • The Literary Portion of the Detective Novel

    Strange that I should be talking about the accusations leveled against genre and literary writers when, lo, I come across an article by George Grella entitled “Murder and Manners: The Formal Detective Novel,” published in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, which contains an example of exactly the type of rhetoric aimed at genre writing in…

  • An Opinion Piece

    A recent post, and the comments that followed, on Nathan Bransford’s blog reminded me of an article by David Ropeik that I’d also recently come across via The Huffington Post regarding the professionality (is that even a word?) of today’s book reviewing culture. Basically, book reviews have turned into something that Just Anyone Can Do. GASP! Being an active member of…

  • Genre vs. Literary: It’s Not a New Debate

    “I cannot say that I have at any time a great admiration for Mr. Raymond West. He is, I know, supposed to be a brilliant novelist, and has made quite a name as a poet. His poems have no capital letters in them, which is, I believe, the height of modernity. His books are about…

  • The Observant Character

    The key to Miss Marple’s sleuthing is her insight into human behavior. Regardless of the violent act that has occurred, there is a simple, human reason/motivation behind it. By observing people and comparing those observations to other observations of human behavior in her history (which Miss Marple has quite a store of….), Miss Marple manages…

  • The Character Who Got Away…Maybe

    The first Miss Marple novel is Murder at the Vicarage. It’s narrated by the Vicar Leonard Clement and the entire story centers around a murder that – as the title so elegantly shows – happened at his vicarage (a.k.a his home…talk about a rough night!). The reader is introduced to his family, spends time with…

  • The Character Who is You

    We’ve spent the last few days talking Poirot, and next week I’m gonna talk Jane Marple, but today I wanted to talk about a recurring character in Christie’s work who has been noted to mirror Agatha Christie herself: Ariadne Oliver. Ariadne Oliver is a sixty-ish woman who writes mystery novels about a foreign detective named…

  • Working the Setting

    So many of the Hercule Poirot novels (and Miss Marple too!)depend upon the setting to contain the story. Often, Christie puts her characters in a small village, brings them into a closed suite of rooms, or, most legendarily, puts them on a train. Let’s look at the pros and cons of this closed-circuit kind of…