In college, my Monday
afternoons went towards attending meetings of the Quiz Society. At the starting
of the year, we divided up into groups of two, each group responsible for
conducting about one quiz every two months on a rotational basis. The rest of
the society would participate.
A bad quiz to my
eyes, were those coming under the broad heading of Pop Culture quizzes,
concentrating almost exclusively on the Godfather films (that I hadn’t seen),
and a couple of bands I had never heard (okay fine, I don’t really listen to
anything besides Bollywood).
A good quiz on the other hand was universally recognized as
one with questions that were workout-able. The emphasis was on how much the
quizzers could figure out from the clues in the question, rather than how much
they knew.
The same metric should equally be applicable to detective
fiction. After all, the primary pleasure in reading these arises from solving
the mystery, along with the detective. By this standard, anything that Agatha
Christie wrote would come out tops. It helped that her detectives were regular
people, amateurs and even when not, they relied more on order and method than
on brilliance. In contrast, if Sherlock Holmes were to occupy a guest-bedroom
in Styles Court or Chimneys, the solution would be forthcoming in a matter of
minutes. Thus, it’s only right that he
features in fantastical settings where his intelligence is suitably challenged.
And where readers have no inkling as to where things are heading.
Going back to Christie, a delightful aspect of her writing is her repertoire
of heroines. As is to be expected, they are morally upright but in a very
unprincipled sort of way. While they pursue noble ends-to clear the name of a fiancé,
or to seek the truth in their quest for adventure, they are not shy of fibbing
or outright manipulation, when these are required. Even the secondary female
characters are interesting. Consider Ms. Percehouse in the Sittaford Mystery.
When her nephew talks of her, she comes across as a caricature of the typical
old spinster-a lonely curmudgeon. When the readers see her for the first time
however, you realise that she is a curmudgeon, but only in the eyes of her
nephew, who she sets to work around her home. She herself wishes that the
nephew stood up to her bullying at times. He would appear more sincere if he
did. Moreover, she combines this good judgement of character with a healthy curiosity,
making her altogether a most real person.
The problem arises when the readers start expecting every
female character to be ‘strong’. And suspecting everyone who is not. So, when an elderly spinster is described as
intelligent at the beginning, and she says “Men are deeper thinkers than women”,
you can’t help but feel that she is being disingenuous, and you are already on
your guard. Or when others commiserate with a character who is helpless, described
as having “no money or place to go”, you wonder why she also lacks initiative.
And true enough, she turns out to have that
in abundance. So much so, that she turns out to be the master-mind of the
entire problem.
Then again, in the Sittaford mystery, I kept suspecting the
Willett mother-daughter duo have to be culpable somehow, since the daughter
couldn’t just be a “pretty girl-scraggy,” who took to squealing and fainting,
when something slightly sinister happened.
Yes, I could have titled the post: "Christie can do no Wrong"
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