Are you ready for some Agatha Christie?
Tyrades! by Danny Tyree
I see dead people.
So do you, if you’ve been caught up in the recent resurgence of interest in the world of mystery writer Agatha Christie (1890-1976).
I think of it as a “somebody else is guilty” pleasure.
For starters, “Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel” by Lucy Foley (the first authorized full-length Miss Marple novel in 50 years) went on sale mere hours before I started typing this column. (So did the latest batch of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, so I’d better burn a bajillion calories at the keyboard, or I’ve killed my chances of fitting into my jeans without a shoehorn. But I digress.)
My wife and I are ready for the penultimate rerun episode of David Suchet’s stellar run as Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (with a new version of Poirot on the horizon). “Tommy & Tuppence” from BritBox awaits our watching.
And our son Gideon – without any parental prodding – discovered Netflix’s serial “The Seven Dials Mystery.” (If only Netflix’s algorithms produced recommendations like “If you liked this movie, you’ll LOVE …cleaning your room every decade or so.”)
I’m glad to see that a classic “whodunnit” can still capture the public imagination. Nowadays, “whodunnit” is generally paired with “and who can find a judge to let them off with a wrist-slap?”
Dame Agatha deserves accolades for carving out a place for herself in a “man’s world” dominated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, G.K. Chesterton (love me some Father Brown!) and the like. When she started out, publishers expected a female author to craft a murderer revelation along the lines of “Mr. Darcy, in the hedgerow, with an ill-timed marriage proposal.”
In the fall of 1975, I strained my brain to solve each week’s mystery before NBC’s Ellery Queen, but my enjoyment is more vicarious now. I usually sit back and go along for the ride with an Agatha Christie program, rather than trying to “match wits” with a world-renowned sleuth. Heck, most of the people I encounter haven’t learned to match wits with their car’s turn signal.
Granted, if you have memorized all the archetypes, tropes and red herrings in Christie’s oeuvre, occasionally the killer is glaringly obvious. Sometimes one of the suspects hits the trifecta. (“I’m a closeted homosexual whose love child wrote him out of his will… and I was conveniently 5,000 miles away in a Nazi U-boat when I committed…er, when the murder was committed.”)
Christie left a lot to the imagination, like…what sort of police academies were churning out the local officers and Scotland Yard inspectors who interacted with Christie’s crime-solvers? (“Look lively, lads! The faster you scale the wall, the faster you can embarrass yourself with wild goose chases!”)
As the saying goes, “Revenge is a dish best served before a detective with more than one brain cell shows up.”
I realize that Marple, Poirot and their fellow Christie creations are not everyone’s cup of tea. Some literary snobs look down their noses at “genre fiction” like mysteries, westerns and romances.
To them, a “real” book should expound upon the Human Condition and be impossible to fit into a box. Hey, my wad of Krispy Kreme receipts says something about my Human Condition and won’t fit into a box. I guess I can expect my Nobel Prize in Literature any day now.
Either that, or I’m as clueless as ever.
-
Copyright 2026 Danny Tyree, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
Danny Tyree welcomes email responses at tyreetyrades@aol.com and visits to his Facebook fan page “Tyree’s Tyrades.”
Copyright 2026 Danny Tyree, All Rights Reserved. Credit: Cagle.com
Comments