My deep dark secret… …is that I’m really very…
admin October 16th, 2006
My deep dark secret…
…is that I’m really very mediocre. The late great Dame Agatha Christie was much smarter than I am.
No, seriously. Friends and family have made such a big deal for so many years about me being some sort of genius that I’ve felt obliged to try to live up to the name, and have felt like anything short of rank pretentiousness showed me up to be the very ordinary person I am. In other words, I felt like a fraud for not being someone I wasn’t. (Twisted? Probably.)
But I can no longer keep up this charade. I confess my inferiority. Agatha Christie has won. She is vastly superior to me. I don’t just mean she’s the Queen of Mystery, though she is. I mean that I always, ALWAYS fall for her red herrings!
So I just finished one of her books yesterday – After the Funeral. As usual, I tried assiduously to follow all of the little cues and clues she dropped; and as usual, when the moment of revelation came to one of the characters (”…but of COURSE…”), I was left madly flipping back through the pages to see what I’d missed. I simply could not get it.
Now, I really enjoy her writing by and large. She spins a good yarn…although the one thing I will say is (and this does not refer to After the Funeral specifically, but to all of her works) that the ONLY characters you can assume not to have ‘dunnit’ are Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. And that’s fine and good, but what it boils down to is that you can absolutely never, EVER make ANY assumptions, and that annoys me! The assumption I was making in trying to figure out who had done what, as usual, did me in. (I can’t say what, because someone here may actually want to read After the Funeral.)
Here’s the absolute truth: I am a singularly unobservant person. I hurt my sister’s feelings about six months ago by not noticing that she’d put a new doorknob onto her bathroom door; the truth was that I had never noticed the old one particularly. I was able to console her somewhat by telling her that – I kid you not – I had worked at my current job, in the same cubicle, for nearly a year before I noticed that there was a light on the underside of the upper storage bin. (Oddly enough, though, I can pick a typographical error out of the middle of a paragraph at ten paces.) The only issue of substance that differentiates me from Stephen Fry’s inept Inspector Thompson in Gosford Park is that I know myself well enough to know I should never be a detective. (The accidents, like gender and country of origin, are not particularly important.)
So what I really enjoy in a “mystery” is the kind of story where John Doe commits his crime, and then I watch him either gradually fall into his own tangled web or get away with it. You know: omniscient narrator and all that. I know it’s not good literature (unless you’re reading Crime and Punishment), but darn it, it makes me feel a lot less stupid! :-p
