My Favorite Agatha Christie Novel

I don't know when I started reading Christie but I've been reading her most of my adult life. Out of her 80+ novels and short stories, I have read 65 of them and hope to read the rest. I fell in love with Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple from the beginning and continue to enjoy them on PBS's Masterpiece Theater. The actor David Suchet is the quintessential Poirot--he has nailed the character to perfection. So many actresses over the years have played Miss Marple that I don't have a favorite.

But my favorite Christie novel, They Came to Bagdad, does not feature either of those sleuths. It's a stand alone among all of her works. I read it in 1989 and it was the one novel of hers that I enjoyed the most. I have even mentioned it in one of my novels, Who'll Kill Agnes? In fact, that novel, a satire on gracious Southern living has quite a bit of Christie influence and some people have told me that the novel reminded them of Hyacinth Bucket (Boo-kay)in the Britcom, Keeping Up Appearances. However, I wrote the novel long before I ever saw that show.

But I digress.

According to Wikipedia, the book "was inspired by Christie's own trips to Baghdad with her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan and is also one of few Christie novels belonging to the action and spy drama genres, rather than to mysteries and whodunnits."

The novel centers around a young tourist named Victoria Jones who discovers a dying secret agent in her hotel room who says three mysterious words to her before he dies. Without giving away more of the plot, suffice it to say that Christie's own marriage to an archaeologist may have been the inspiration for one of the characters in Victoria's life.

I have always been a fan of international intrigue and this one entertained me more than most.

The Ladies of the Golden Age of Mystery

My love of mystery stories began in childhood: the Nancy Drew stories, The Bobbsey Twins and The Hardy Boys drew me in and kept me in the world of mystery and suspense. As I grew older, I was drawn to the ladies of The Golden Age of Mystery, most of whom were from the British Isles: Margery Allingham (1904-1966), Agatha Christie (1890-1976), Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957, Josephine Tey (1896-1952). But I would also include Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982) who was from New Zealand and American Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958).

These days not only do I still read these ladies (I may never finish all 80+ novels by Agatha Christie) but I have gone from these original cozies to hard-boiled to suspense to slash and gore to international intrigue and to anything that has a puzzling mystery to it. As I researched this piece, I wondered where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes fit into the mystery genre. I discovered that the fictional detective's stories are generally considered a major innovation in the field of crime fiction. I still read the fictional Nero Wolfe, Ellery Queen and Perry Mason plus the blockbusters of today: Janet Evanovich, Sue Grafton, Mary Higgins Clark, Patricia Cornwell, John Sandford, David Baldacci, Stuart Woods, Michael Connelly and the late Robert Ludlum to name just a few.

But for the time being, I will remain with those illustrious ladies of The Golden Age although many male writers excelled in the genre. According to Wikipedia, "The Golden Age proper is in practice usually taken to refer to a type of fiction which was predominant in the 1920s and 1930s but had been written since at least 1911 and is still being written — though in much smaller numbers — today." According to Ronald Knox, a detective story "must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end."

In the coming months I will review a favorite novel by each of the "Golden Ladies" mentioned above.