October 17th – Agatha Christie – ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’ (1924) – Read and listen to it here.
Challenge list here.
I really enjoy Christie’s short stories, they are like slipping on a very comfortable glove. In this one, I really liked the portrait painting of the main character in the opening paragraphs, and the scene setting, and the mystery as it unwound. The ending was also quite funny in a dark way, which is very Christie.
It also has those touches of spooky and macabre that you know must have a rational explanation, and as you wait and see, it all becomes clear.
For this one, I think I’ll set out the Christie novels and shorts that have had the greatest influence on me as a writer, and a person. I was an avid reader of Agatha Christie’s Poirot and Marple series as a teenager, and I collected as many as I could – all, unfortunately, now lost in a house move.
Character Studies:
Character sketches are one of Christie’s main strengths, I think, and today’s story exemplifies that in the opening paragraphs where we’re introduced to the main character. I love the way she draws a clear picture of the people she is writing about without describing their physical characteristics hardly at all.
For the novel that drew me to actually deep-dive into the psyches of my characters, and delve into proper character studies, I would have to say it was Cards on the Table (1936). This has the usual problematic elements of representation in certain areas, which I was beginning to notice the more Christie I read, but the parts of this book which really got me were the deep studies of each character, made to determine who was psychologically most likely to commit the crime.
The histories of the characters were considered, their backstories fleshed out, their actions scrutinised for motive, and a picture built up of each of them, so that Poirot might make his determinations. Of all the bridge players in the room that night, who was most likely to stab their host through the heart unseen by everyone else? Who was most likely to take that calculated risk?
There are more characters in Murder on the Orient Express (1934), where something very similar happens, and which I would say is the more famous of the two, but this later novel feels like a condensed, intensified version of this one.
Evil Under the Sun (1941) was another novel that has stuck with me for some time, not just for the intricacies of the murder plot, but also because of the awkward, nerdy teenage girl with the library books about poisons (Linda Marshall). I really appreciated that Christie wrote awkward, autistic-coded girls into her books as well as practical women, sensible girls, and so on. In the 2001 David Suchet adaptation, the role was gender-swapped, and played by Russell Tovey as Lionel Marshall, instead of Linda. I think that’s partly why I prefer the 1982 adaptation with Peter Ustinov, where they kept Linda as a girl, even though I prefer Suchet in the main role.
Both adaptations leave out the witchcraft subplot, where Linda overdoses on sleeping pills believing that she has killed her stepmother through dark magic and a wax poppet. Look – let autistic teenagers with body issues have creepy hobbies.
What I love about the subplot is that Poirot sits her down and tells her the difference between wanting to kill someone and actually doing it, and tells her that in destroying the poppet, what she really killed was her hatred for her stepmother, and not her stepmother in reality. Linda says she did feel better after destroying the doll, and that’s what she has been struggling with as much as the murder itself.
(I do love the way Gothic elements are woven into the novels like this, and the way things take random left-turns into folk horror. The adaptations often lose a lot by not leaning into this. I think the one exception is the Kenneth Branagh version of Hallowe’en Party (1969), renamed A Haunting in Venice (2023), which is more Poirot’s war trauma version. This adaptation leans fully into the supernatural and occult drama of the setting and the text, and goes beyond it, making it almost as much a horror film as it is a mystery/thriller.)
Other books that really stuck with me in particular were The Moving Finger (1942) and Sparkling Cyanide (1944), again for their character sketches; A Murder is Announced (1950), with its couples (plural) of obvious lesbians; and At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), for its mother-daughter drama. (I adored Miss Marple – she was definitely one of my heroes growing up, and something I aspired to grow into, along with Granny Weatherwax (from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series).)
And Then There Were None (1939) also ranks very highly for me as a novel that really concentrates on its characters, and their psychology. I really enjoyed the 2015 mini-series adaptation version of this book. I think there’s a real skill in limiting the movements and actions of characters, reducing them down to the confines of a predefined, rigidly delineated space, and then sustaining suspense and interest almost entirely through character interaction and development as the plot unfolds.
Without that skill, nobody would really care who lived, who died, or when the next kill would be. It comes to matter, because you start learning about the characters themselves, and the title is its own awful promise to the reader that whoever you become attached to is not going to make it out.
Those are my picks, the ones that have had the biggest impact on the ways I think about character building; others impacted the way I think about plot, and atmosphere, and so on. But I will leave it here for this post!
Let me know your fave Christies in the comments!
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