Christie on target in crime fiction

John Curran, author of Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making, was in Ennis recently to speak at the annual Coroner’s Society of Ireland’s conference. Here, he shares his passion for crime fiction and reveals some of his favourite titles in the whodunit genre to Carol Byrne

 

 

When asked to speak at the annual conference of the Coroner’s Society of Ireland in Ennis recently, noted author and Agatha Christie fan John Curran said noted the topic of coroners in crime fiction would be a challenging one, as coroners don’t figure to any great extent in the genre.

Not one to shy away from a challenge, however, the Dubliner did uncover a number of books where coroners feature, although not always in the best light.
“One or two writers specifically write about coroners but in the majority of crime fiction, the coroner just appears in the middle of chapter seven and that’s it. It’s usually someone who isn’t even given a name,” he said.

As he outlined to the gathering at the conference, in many cases, the coroner is a “cantankerous, cranky, middle aged male”.
“In the sort of fiction I specialise in, there is only a male coroner, there is no such thing as a female coroner. I did make the point however that author MR Hall’s main protagonist throughout his latest book series is a young female coroner in a remote area of Wales, so that is quite a breakthrough,” he said.

Up to four years ago, John worked as a civil servant in Dublin City Council. He took a year off to write a book about Agatha Christie. The publication was such a success he was asked to do a second book, so he decided to avail of an incentivised early retirement scheme to start working on his next instalment. In addition he undertook a PhD which, on its conclusion, will result in another book.

“My career has changed dramatically. The books are based on Agatha Christie’s notebooks. I purposefully didn’t want to write about her life because that has been covered in two very well written biographies. I wanted to concentrate on her work because that’s really what interests me and to be given access to these notebooks, all of her papers and diaries was an honour and a wonderful opportunity,” he explained.

At the conference, John also delved into the characters of doctors in crime fiction, regularly featuring as either the detective or killer.
“I made the point that Agatha Christie, in her novels alone, has six or seven doctor murderers, probably because, certainly in the years she was writing, the doctor was somewhere below God in the pecking order. There have always been doctor murderers in real life of course but for the readers of Christie and a lot of her contemporaries, the doctor’s word was law and no one questioned it. Of course, being a doctor, they have access to all sorts of clever ways of killing people especially with poisons, so they were always a favourite, certainly of Christie and I’m sure every crime writer has had a doctor killer at some stage,” he said.

One of his particular favourites in the crime fiction genre featuring one such doctor is the 1931 classic Malice Aforethought, written by Anthony Berkeley Cox under the pseudonym of Francis Iles.
The book tells the story of a Devon physician who slowly poisons his domineering wife so that he may be with the woman he loves. John explained it is a prime example of the inverted detective story invented by R Austin Freeman some years earlier.

“Malice Aforethought is a wonderful book, it is one of the all time classics of crime fiction. It’s not a whodunit but there is a twist on the very last page and one of the reviews at the time said not one reader in 10,000 was going to spot what is going to happen at the last page. One of the things about the book, which I think is fascinating now because it was published in 1931, is it is a wonderful picture of life with the social pecking order that went on in a small village in the 1930s. It is told from the point of view of the doctor who was very highly regarded, but in this instance, he is not a nice doctor shall we say. It is also one of the books that has been in almost continuous print since 1931,” he said.

“The other point I should make about the inverted story is, and it’s only when you’ve read a few that you realise it, it plays havoc with your moral compass because, normally in the inverted story, the victim is someone you really feel deserved it and the person carrying out the murder is a really likeable character. So you begin to feel as the story goes on that maybe the victim really deserved it and when the police move in you find yourself saying they’re going to notice that he left a fingerprint, or they’re going to notice that phonecall couldn’t have been made and then you say to yourself I should be thinking that this man has killed his wife, I should want him to be caught,” he continued.

Another favourite of John’s, albeit more obscure, is The Beast Must Die by Nicolas Blake.
“Nicholas Blake is actually Cecil Day-Lewis, the Irish poet and father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis. This is a wonderfully clever book and it is just being brought back into reprint. Again, it is told from the point of view of the killer and the opening line is I’m going to kill a man. It is a mystery writer narrating this and his little son has just been knocked down by a hit and run driver and he sets out to find who did it. Halfway through the book, after he has identified the man and his family, the book changes approach and it is told in the third person. The hit and run driver is dead but you are still not sure whether the person in the first half of the book has done it or if it was someone else altogether. It’s the best of both worlds, it looks like it is an inverted story but it is a real whodunit then in the second half,” John continued.

John said as far as he is concerned, however, Agatha Christie wrote the best whodunits ever. 
“When people ask me the secret of her success, the glib answer I usually give is if I knew what it was, I would be at home doing it because no one else has managed to do it. Realistically, I think it’s a combination of factors. One of them has been very good storytelling that makes you want to get to the bottom of the page and to turn that page, that is the secret of good storytelling, whether in crime fiction or any other type of fiction. I also think that her plots, even though they are very, very clever, they always turn on something very ordinary, not on esoteric scientific knowledge or psychological insight. It is usually something ordinary like a name that can refer to a man or a woman, like the name Frances or Evelyn. It can turn on right or left handedness, on the colour of your eyes, if you look in a mirror it reverses images and this is all in the days before forensic science. I also think people can identify with her characters, even though she is accused of writing just Cluedo-type characters, when actually there is a lot more to the characters than meets the eye,” he said.

Apart from the most well-known Agatha Christie books, John reveals his favourite is Five Little Pigs, published in 1943.
“She took the nursery rhyme This Little Piggy Went to Market and created a murder story with just five suspects. A young woman comes to Poirot and asks him to solve a murder of which her mother was convicted of and who subsequently died in prison, but she knows she is innocent. So Poirot goes back to the five people and asks them to write an account of the day the murder happened. The reason I admire it so much is, firstly, it’s a very good whodunit but it is also a very good novel regarding the inter-relationships between the five people and how it goes devastatingly wrong. Also, when I discovered the notes for this, there are 75 pages of notes. What impressed me from the very earliest notes to the finished book – everything changed, the characters, their names, the murder message, the setting, the relationship between all these characters. These books that millions of people all over the world find so easy to read are the perfect example of her concealed art because when you look at the earliest notes, it’s almost unrecognisable,” he concluded.