Category: Agatha Christie

  • Can Series Characters Get in the Way?

    In An Appointment With Death, Hercule Poirot is on vacation in Jordan. He is called into a case involving the death of a woman in the historic city of Petra. This sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Christie’s sleuth on the case. Unfortunately, in the actual narration of the story, Poirot shows up just in time…

  • Consistency of Physical Description

    I have trouble keeping track of the various eye colors of my characters through one book. In my last completed draft of a book, I caught at least three variations of eye color of my main character’s eyes. Apparently I just couldn’t decide. So, as I read through Christie’s body of work, my main thought…

  • Characters Who Don’t Make It Through The Series

    In both of Christie’s series – Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple – the opening books are narrated by characters who fall away fairly quickly in the series, never to be heard from in the same way again: John Hastings as Poirot’s bumbling sidekick in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and Vicar Leonard Clement in Murder…

  • Meditating on What Makes Poirot a Good Series Character

    In her career, Agatha Christie came up with, not one, but two iconic characters: Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. Today we’ll look at Poirot, seeing why he’s a good focal point for a mystery series. “In her Autobiography Christie gives a detailed account of the genesis of the The Mysterious Affair at Styles. By…

  • How Fast the Machine Can Get Out of Hand

    On Wednesday we talked about how writers are subject to the language of their day. This brought to mind a recent bout of my own with the rhetoric machine – specifically the quotation portion of the machine. As you surely know, a couple weeks ago, Osama bin Laden was killed. The national reaction was big.…

  • Product-of-Your-Time Rhetoric – Is Awareness the Answer?

    Agatha Christie is my third mentor for this year, and she’s also the third British writer who published actively in the ’20s and ’30s. Woolf, Wodehouse, and Christie could, very conceivably, have hung out and had some beers together. They were all about the same age and wrote throughout both World Wars. What’s so interesting…

  • Plato and Aristotle Weigh in on Agatha Christie

    Back in the olden days, Plato made the argument that still resonates today: Violence on T.V. causes violence in real life. Okay, maybe that’s not a direct quote. But the essence of the argument is there. According to Plato in his Republic, poets specifically should not be allowed into a well-ordered society because, well, they…

  • The Solution to the Pop-Up Character Syndrome in Mysteries

    During a critique session, years ago, one of our group members submitted a first-chapter of a novel she was working on. Members of the group had taken her pages home, read it over for the month, marked it up, and then we all came back to discuss–which is our M.O. Rarely is it the case…

  • The Bestsellingest Author Ever: Agatha Christie!

    Welcome, my friends, to a new month and a new mentor! For May and June we will be exploring the vast amount of work that is Agatha Christie’s oeuvre. (I love that word, don’t you? I can’t pronounce it, but it sure looks cool on the page: oeuvre.) As you may or may not know,…

  • The Mystery of the Cow Creamer: An Imaginary Dialogue Between P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie by Jenny

    “I say, Agatha!” calls Wodehouse from across the tea room. “You’re frightfully good at puzzling things out, what?” “So I am,” responds Christie. “Perhaps you could help me out with a bit of a mystery. My cow creamer has disappeared.” “Why would you need to cream a cow?” “No. It’s a creamer in the shape…