Agatha Christie- The Collection - The First Six Titles
All Harpercollins £14.99 each
Are HarperCollins wasting their time in reissuing the entire
works of a detective novelist who died over twenty years ago and whose literary gifts
were, by universal agreement, limited?The answer is no. Agatha Christie was, and will remain for the foreseeable future, supreme in the art of plotting a mystery novel. The virtues of plot are sometimes doubted - perhaps especially by those who find it difficult to construct a satisfactory story-line. But there is a reason why Christie remains immensely popular at a time when many of her contemporaries who had more refined literary skills are forgotten. It is the sheer readabilty of her work.
Two of the first six books in this new collection are, by any standards,masterpieces of fair-play plotting. It is no coincidence that they are the two Poirot novels, The Mysterious Affair At Styles and Murder On The Links. Although Christie later tired of the dapper Belgian sleuth, he brought the best out of her in terms of whodunit construction. She was less adept with the short detective story, as the disappointing Poirot Investigates illustrates: she only escaped from Conan Doyle's shadow with later non-series short stories such as "Accident" and "Witness For The Prosecution".
The Secret Adversary and The Secret Of
Chimneys are light thrillers, not to be taken seriously: they show Christie
learning her craft and having fun at the same time. Many critics have under-estimated her
gift for quiet humour. But The Man In The Brown Suit, although equally
breezy, is of a higher order. It is a genuine page-turner and, more than that, boasts a
clever plot device which anticipates a legendary classic which she wrote a little while
later, The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd.These early works were by no means instant best-sellers. The fact that they are still likely to achieve substantial sales long after their author's death is a tribute to reader power rather than to the vision of the original publishers, John Lane. Christie felt so hard done to by Lane's
contract terms that she defected to Collins at the earliest opportunity: a salutory lesson for those publishers who under-rate the value of keeping the author satisfied. Christie always regarded entertaining her readers as her number one priority. This attractive new Collection does her no more than justice."
(Martin Edwards)
