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Source ISBN: 9780007562695
Ebook Edition 2010 ISBN: 9780007422128 Version: 2018-09-26
After the Funeral: An Introduction by Sophie Hannah
In a poll conducted by the Crime Writersâ Association in November 2013 to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary, Agatha Christie was voted âBest Ever Authorâ. Any other result would, frankly, have been rather a joke. Christieâs novels have sold more than two billion copies in 109 languages (and probably more). Her play The Mousetrap has been delighting audiences in the West End for over 60 years. It would be fair to say, I think, that no other crime novelist comes close to matching her achievement. For me, as a psychological thriller writer, Agatha Christie is and will always be the gold standardâa lifelong inspiration whose every inventive tale demonstrates exactly how it should be done. It was Christie who made me fall in love with mystery stories at the age of twelve and, rereading her work now at the age of 42, I still believe that she cranks up the excitement and the intellectual puzzlement like no other.
In the âBest Ever Novelâ category of the Crime Writersâ Association poll, Christie won again, with a story that many of her fans believe to be her best: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Indeed, it is a deserving winner for the boldness of its solution. Interestingly, the most popular Christie novels tend to be the ones with the high-concept seemingly-impossible- yet-possible solutions, the ones that take your breath away: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express. Itâs easy to see why this might be. Christie, when conceiving these stories, gave her readers exactly what they wanted: the best story possible, the one most likely to elicit gasps of shock and astonishment when the genius solution is revealed at the end.
Sensibly, Christie didnât give a damn about the tedious consideration of âCome on, how likely is this to happen, really?â So long as it could happen in theoryâas long as no law of science made it impossibleâthen she quite rightly deemed it to be plausible, and therefore acceptable fodder for fiction. She would, I suspect, have little sympathy for those contemporary readers who determinedly misunderstand the word âplausibleâ and use it as if it were synonymous with âcommonplaceâ, âeverydayâ or âhas happened to several people I know personallyâ.
I say âcontemporary readersâ because I think our expectations of novels have changed. While Christie was alive and writing, my impression is that most readers of crime fiction shared her philosophy of âabove all else, tell the most exciting story that you canâ. Now, however, a far greater value is placed upon what many insist on calling âplausibilityâ but what is in fact a worrying lack of imagination seeking to curtail the imaginations of others. Many, for example, might feel uncomfortable with a super-clever detective like Hercule Poirot, who always gets the right answer and proves himself over and over again to be a man of unparalleled genius. Someâhaving met no unparalleled geniuses themselves and therefore finding them impossible to believe inâmight say, âNo, this is not realisticâcanât you have the detective being a bit more ordinary in his capabilities, and maybe solving the case by⦠oh, I donât know, maybe putting some fingerprints into the database and finding a match?â