Read receipts: K Narayanan writes on growing up with Christie

I don’t remember the first Agatha Christie I read. I remember being resistant to the idea.

As a nine-year-old who had just discovered Sherlock Holmes, the idea that a woman could write a good murder mystery seemed far-fetched.

Then a friend of mine, who had just recommended The Godfather to me, which I read with a kind of horrified relish, called me a fool, when I told him what I thought of Christie. He was a few years older, a senior at school, and I still remember his amused smile as we stood at his front door, with the sounds of his father’s veena lessons filtering through the twilight.

So I read Christie. I may have started with Dumb Witness. I remember thinking that was a striking title. A murder is committed by the simple expedient of a string tied across the top of the stairs. I remember examining the stairs at our house with a macabre fascination.

But the book required more patience than I was used to. More attention to detail. Poirot and Hastings were Holmes and Watson all over again. When I talked to my friend, he listened and smiled. “Now read the good ones,” he said.

Back then, there were two great circulating libraries in Madras. Easwari on Lloyds Road, and Raviraj on Usman Road. They were Aladdin’s caves, fragrant with old books. One had to navigate piles of magazines and books heaped on the floor before one could get to the Christie shelves. These were paperbacks, bound by local binders. Some had no cover; just plain paper. Occasionally, one would find a dedication: “To Dear Shalini on her 14th birthday, with love from Akka”.

I went through all the books I could find. Murder on the Orient Express. Evil Under the Sun. The Secret Adversary. I remember finding her short story Philomel Cottage in an anthology of tales of mystery and detection. I was disappointed it wasn’t a Poirot story.

By the time I finished it, I was convinced it was one of the greatest short stories ever written.

I began to keep track. The Fontana paperbacks had lists of Christie titles on the front or the back. Other enthusiasts often marked the ones they had read. So did I.

There were tantalising titles neither library seemed to have, so my sister started to take me to the British Council Library to fill out those small rectangular cards with information from a mysterious catalogue, to make reservations. A postcard would arrive within the month, telling us the book was available, and she would eventually toss a heavy hardback at me. The British Council didn’t do paperbacks.

***

I read Christie voraciously for the next couple of years. But there were other authors. Arthur Hailey. Robert Ludlum. Desmond Bagley. JRR Tolkien. And so Christie was sidelined, like Enid Blyton or Richmal Crompton. It seemed a natural part of growing up. I’d read her books. It was time to move on. Rereading something didn’t enter into it at the time.

College was a time of discovery. One could read Sartre and Camus and have earnest discussions about TS Eliot’s Burnt Norton or The Waste Land in small smoke-filled rooms, while listening to Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. Or spend a blessed day alone on the college lawns with Douglas Adams and PG Wodehouse and endless cups of tea, as friends came and went.

It was only when I started working that I renewed my relationship with Christie. This time, it was through an adaptation. I still remember that glorious night in the 1980s when Doordarshan broadcast the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express, starring Albert Finney. My sister and I watched in delight, swatting mosquitoes and trying to find changes from the books. Then came an adaptation in colour. David Suchet was Poirot, and he was perfect. The music, the art, the atmosphere, the supporting cast could not have been bettered. The series (which ran from 1989 to 2013) became required viewing.

But there were changes. I remember the Suchet version of Murder on the Orient Express, where the ending places emphasis on the moral decision taken, something the book dwelt on lightly or not at all.

It was time to reread.

Rereading as an adult was like reading the books for the first time. I remembered the problem. Remember who did it, and how it was done. What I could now see was how the puzzle was put together. The subtexts leapt out: Mr Hardman’s homosexuality in The Double Clue, the relationship between Miss Murgatroyd and Miss Hinchcliffe in A Murder is Announced.

The prose is as sparse as Hemingway’s, I realised. “Even the agency hadn’t held out much hope. And then the letter had come.” Or “It came by the six o’clock post. An illiterate scrawl, written on common paper and enclosed in a dirty envelope with the stamp stuck on crooked.”

I began to see that the books were a window into middle-class England through the 20th century. The old certainties of Empire gave way to the pessimism and paranoia of war. Household estates becoming unmaintainable as taxes rose. Green spaces were taken over by housing blocks. Sex, drugs and swinging London crept in. Underneath all of this, the nature of human evil remained a constant.

Christie has always had her detractors. Raymond Chandler raged against the Golden Age crime writers in his seminal essay The Simple Art of Murder. The critic Edmund Wilson published a diatribe against the queens of crime (specifically Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L Sayers). PD James, who has often been called The Queen of Crime herself, called Christie “a lady I think of less as a novelist than as a literary conjurer whose sleight of hand as she shuffles her cardboard characters can outwit the keenest eye”.

All I can do is shrug. Because this is irrelevant. Christie isn’t Proust or Kafka. Her books may not be high art. As far as I am concerned, they are craft. And sometimes, that’s even better.

(K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and, occasionally, technology)